The Futility of Protest

The date was Sept. 17, 2006, and the sun shone radiantly in the pristine cerulean sky above New York, illuminating the verdant foliage of Central Park. But then a triumphant yell of "peace!" punctuated the air, and the idyll was shattered by the clamor of thousands of shouting voices.

Welcome to the Darfur rally in the East Meadow, one of many similar events held worldwide on the same day. A few rows from the elevated stage where the speaker had just come to an electrifying conclusion sat a youth of 18 years who had purportedly been to jail for attempting to report on the crisis. He instructed his neighbors to hold each other's hands and close their eyes. "Come with me on a walk through Darfur," he said.

No longer was it daytime in Central Park, but dusk all across an infinite plane of sand, carpeted with blood and viscera. No patches of green flora or reassuring fauna blessed the landscape, and now the children were running not in joy but in terror. But it was a wasted effort. Even if they were to escape, they would surely die of thirst, malnutrition, or exposure, joining their 400,000 countrymen in an unmarked grave.

Such is the tragedy of Darfur, the godforsaken region of western Sudan that is the site of the most recent and ongoing African genocide. What is also tragic is the world's inability to do anything about it, and the utter futility of the protestors' efforts to bring Darfur into the world's consciousness.

At the entrance to the rally, young men handed out blue stickers and signs, and two girls chanted, pointlessly and alternately, "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"

The crowd, bedecked in blue, filed into the meadow and began to wait expectantly. The event began, and a succession of speakers took the stage, which faced inward toward the park. Between the stage's shy azimuth, the insular setting, and the wall demarcating the park from Fifth Avenue, nobody on the Upper East Side, or the rest of the world, seemed to care what was going on.

Nevertheless, the crowd seemed indifferent to this, bursting into a rapturous roar whenever a would-be orator yelled "peace!" with all the confidence of Ralph Nader proclaiming an imminent electoral victory. Luminaries such as former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Canadian Foreign Minister Irwin Cotler graced the podium. Cotler said: "This genocide was preventable, and we did not act. Let us resolve that we will never again be indifferent to evil. We will speak and act."

But alas, we will not.

Darfur ought to be a cause well worth publicizing. The case for military intervention is much stronger than it was for Iraq three-and-a-half years ago, and those who have the power to put an end to the slaughter have a moral impetus to do so. This, however, is precisely the problem: no interested bodies are capable of successfully intervening, at least with force. The U.N.'s peacekeeping force-70,000 troops scattered globally throughout 17 diffuse locations-is clearly a paper tiger, and the U.S. military remains hopelessly mired in Iraq. The victims of Darfur have nowhere to turn.

It's logical for one to only care about a situation to the extent that one can change something about it. What the ideologues present at Central Park two Sundays ago fail to realize is that, while the idea of even partially alleviating the situation in Darfur is immensely admirable in principle, it cannot happen while the U.S. and U.N. remain militarily impotent, and it will never happen as a result of their vacuous and ultimately useless rallies. And since such activism won't accomplish anything, why bother?