What the fuck is up with humanity?
First I see the video of the "Naked Wizard" being tased at Coachella in Philly. The Huffington Post blurb seems to give it a humorous cast, but I see nothing but a harmless man being forcibly held to the ground by two policemen and then tased into submission.
Then there's the
even more disturbing footage from the We The Kings show in Philly last night. One of the supporting bands parked their van somewhere they shouldn't, so the police felt the need to shove around some young guys until one of their heads left a large pool of blood on the stage.
What. The actual. Fuck.
On top of all this, I'm in the middle of reading "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families," the riveting and wrenching account of the Rwandan genocide by Philip Gourevitch. I'm learning so much that is so important to know, but it's killing my soul piece by piece. The book includes the story of one man who just did what he thought was right (I think his story was the inspiration for the movie
Hotel Rwanda), and he's so innocently and genuinely baffled by the fact that there weren't more people like him in the country. He protected thousands in his hotel, with no selfish intent, just doing what's right. And he was the startling anomaly in a country gone collectively insane, where priests gunned down their own congregations and police murdered schoolchildren.
The story is so enormous and horrible that the mind truly struggles to wrap around it. Neighbor truly turned on neighbor, in the most literal and horrifying of ways. Meanwhile, the international community actively tried to avoid intervening. The US (Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton specifically) did verbal gymnastics to avoid classifying it as a genocide and thus obligating their own response. France was the only power to involve themselves, and they did so by bolstering and aiding the genocidal regime.
Afterwards, as the RPF (the opposition to the Hutu Power government that had organized the genocide) swept across the country reclaiming it, the Hutu Power leaders scared everyone remaining in the country into fleeing ahead of the RPF because it claimed they would slaughter everyone (not true). A million refugees settled in Goma, Zaire, and were immediately showered with international humanitarian aid efforts.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
I just. I can't deal.