Pure Chance by Zombyboy

Firstly, thanks to Rae for asking me to be one of her guest bloggers. It's always an honor to be asked to help be a caretaker for someone else's blog during their absence. The only tough part is that no one can replace another successful blogger; the styles, the topics, and the overall feel of the posts are bound to change. So what you read from me and the other authors over the next few days may not be precisely what you expect.

I hope that you'll enjoy the taste of some different styles and some topics that normally wouldn't grace these fine pages.

So, thanks again to Rae, and I hope that y'all find something to enjoy in all this fun guest blogging.

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It's pure chance that I was born to a reasonably normal family in the United States. I've never known the worst of poverty, I have never felt the all-encompassing hunger of starvation, and I have never felt the fear of living in a country steeped in war. It's pure chance that, even in these circumstances, I was blessed with above average intelligence, curiosity, and creativity; the burdens I carry are light in comparison to so much of the rest of the world.

While I've never believed that for someone else's life to be good it has to mirror my own--that is, a Merry Christmas doesn't have to involve an orgy of capitalist spending and doesn't have to revolve around twinkling lights and Christmas trees--I do think that it's worth remembering that the majority of the world's people don't know the comforts and gifts that we have living in the developed nations. And, even amongst the developed nations, we American's are doubly blessed.

I don't say these things as a way to rouse feelings of guilt--the things that we enjoy were gifts that millions struggled and fought to give us. Guilt at the gift simply diminishes the sacrifice and the efforts that came before.

With no feelings of guilt, and with no sense of shame, we can still look out at the world and hope for something better.

In Uganda, in the midst of what feels like an endless war of the Lord's Resistance Army against the government, the atrocities are almost numbing. (Beware; the picture used to illustrate this story is disturbing and graphic.) The brutality shown by the rebel LRA isn't unique in the history of war, but it is no less disgusting for its familiarity.

Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has become synonymous with torture, abductions and killings

"They tied me and laid me down. They told me not to cry. Not to make any noise. Then one man sat on my chest, men held my arms, legs, and one held my neck".

"Another picked up an axe. First he chopped my left hand, then my right. Then he chopped my nose, my ears and my mouth with a knife."

The LRA subsists by stealing food, equipment, and children. The children are turned into rebel soldiers, and, as such, are killed along with the adults when the government mounts their own anti-terrorist operations.

When pre-teen children are being killed, intentionally, as rebels in military raids, something has gone horribly, painfully wrong. In a story about accompanying government troops to the site of a "great victory" against the rebels, a writer for the BBC discovers children and women counted as enemy rebels in an indiscriminate attack. This kind of a victory is nearly as agonizing as the viciousness of the rebels.

It was a scene of terrible carnage. Dozens of bodies lay scattered around the undergrowth where they had fallen.

The first body I saw, the first of these 55 dead rebels, was about four-years-old.

Almost certainly he had been born in captivity - probably, like so many others, the product of a forced marriage between an older rebel and a young abducted girl.

Some 10 metres away, just such a girl lay, dead, stripped to the waist. She may have been the child's mother.

While I sit here writing, having enjoyed my company's Christmas party the night before, I am well fed, clothed, sheltered and warm. I don't feel guilt or shame at being American. I do feel the obligation of the powerful to help the weaker, though. Whether that help is in the form of donations in hopes of helping to feed the hungry or in the form of pressuring our government to do what it can to mediate in conflicts like the one in Uganda, it's the hope that in acting against evil we can help to make the world a better place.

I've worked to make the best of the opportunities that I've been given--and I've been largely successful--but I realize that those opportunities wouldn't exist without the gifts that others had given to me. Without the soldiers who fought and died to protect our freedom, without the founders of this country who created our nation to be prosperous and strong, and without those people who came before me who built the schools and the systems that prepared me to be the person that I am, I wouldn't have had so many chances for success.

Being thankful to those who came before--the nameless and faceless many who made my life measurably better--means more to me than simply saying thank you on occasion. It means finding ways to pass on the gift.

Posted by Rae at December 16, 2004 07:06 PM