if you wanna sing out...

it's something i forget a lot. i was reminded of it last night, watching Hotel Rwanda at the Ritz. There is no fear of soldiers coming to my apartment in the night and killing me and little Jasper Jones. There is no fear of leaving my apartment because I might be shot on the way to the grocery store. These were real concerns for the Tutsi people between April and June of 1994, when an estimated 800,000 Tutsi were killed. Hotel Rwanda speaks about the genocide of the Tutsi tribe by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda in 1994, and the way one Hutu man sheltered over a thousand Tutsi people as the Hutus attempted to slaughter the entire Tutsi people. How blessed we are as Americans to have so much of our struggles imposed not from forces beyond our control (and definitely not life-threatening forces)...and how much can we do because our struggles are a cake-walk* in comparison! but if we only realized just how good we have it, i suspect we wouldn't be so afraid to be brave, to stand out, to shine.

*words spoken by dave, who witnessed the aftermath of many of these atrocities during his work with the office of foreign disaster assistance for the state department.