Is Africa too far away?

Blood Diamond. The Last King of Scotland. Ads about genocide in Darfur on the sides of city buses. What will this new awareness, this flash of conscience, actually bring about? Is it the ongoing evidence of slow, systemic change, imperceptible as it happens unless it is as big and beautiful as the face of Nelson Mandela elected to lead South Africa? Or is it just the cause celebre of the moment, a important distraction for those of us with a conscience because the tragedies of our own making--the devastation of Afghanistan and re-emergence of the Taliban, the complete destruction of public order and disintegration into civil chaos and martial law of Iraq--are too painful to really face, or too big to comprehend? We elected that president and his regime--not all of us, but enough of you that all of us have had to live with it.

Diamonds I have known about for years. I had a fight during a previous relationship about why I wouldn't buy into the whole cultural phenomenom, why wearing a fat shiny clear rock on my left hand seemed like the wrong choice, even if one could prove undeniably that a diamond was "conflict-free." Even though it is my birthstone.

When I lived in New Orleans, I heard about a social theory that places in the southern states where sugar cane plantations had flourished where the places where racism had the most violent roots that were still manifested today, due to the degrading conditions and tremendously hard work that tending and harvesting sugar cane required. New Orleans was a prime example, with its clear delineations of race and the sometimes even more divisions of class. Those of us who have or do live there knew it was a timebomb, with the slow tiny explosions along the way as it fizzled toward the big boom (the murder rate, the carjacking, the boarded-up falling down public housing projects). We just didn't know the catalyst would come from Mother Nature (albeit helped along by our activities contributing to global warming, pollution and climate change, etc.)

The idea of people attacking their own, oppressing their own, is something I continue to struggle to comprehend. Usually there is some measure of difference, no matter now subtle, that sets "me" and "you" apart, that an outsider may not be able to see. My ideas, my tribe, my religion, my skin color, my education, my caste, my socioeconomic background, a parents' occupation, the place I grew up, the team I root for, the person I love, the animal I keep. But what would I kill for? Or are there just enough rules in place, do I have enough access and opportunity, that I don't have to kill--does killing just happen on the margins, and the rest is a game of slow ascent (i.e. American Dream) or descent (decline of the middle class, getting subsumed by drugs or other bad choices or lack of opportunity in the form of bigotry and its high walls and glass or even concrete ceilings?

By the way, Leonardo DiCaprio more than redeemed himself in Blood Diamond. Well done, Leo. What was the name of that big ship again?