This past week, the Syrian city of Aleppo was nearly destroyed as the Syrian government recaptured it with the help of their allies in Russia and Iran. Nearly 6,000 men, women, and children fled the city, while many more were trapped inside, tweeting and posting their final goodbyes as they called for help from the rest of the world to stop what was essentially becoming a mass genocide.
Why is no one talking about this? Why have I seen so few articles discussing the situation, so few people posting and spreading the news, trying to stop the type of event that we look back on in history and ask, "How could this have happened?" In a sea of posts about Christmas, finals, parties, and weather complaints, I can't help but feel heartbroken over the fact that no one seems to be talking about the current situation in Aleppo.
You look at attacks in New York, Paris, Belgium, and the news was everywhere. Everyone was adding filters to their Facebook profile photos, tweeting that they were heartbroken, that they couldn't believe this was happening, what a crime against humanity these kinds of events were. But with Aleppo, so many people seem content to cast a blind eye towards the situation and allow the murder, the horror, the terror to continue. As people publicly say goodbye and beg for help, for mercy, for the international eye to turn to them and stop this genocide, they're ignored.
Seventeen years ago, after the genocide in Rwanda, in which almost a million were murdered, then-secretary general of the UN, Kofi Annan, stood before the committee and apologized for the fact that the UN did not stop the situation, not for a 100 days, a 100 days were thousands of lives were lost. Where humanity was failed. And he promised that the UN would never again fail to protect innocent civilians from genocide and mass murder.
It feels like a hollow promise, now, no? How can we possibly stand by and let these types of things happen? I remember history classes all throughout my life, students asking our teacher, horror and heartbreak evident on their faces, how we could let things like the Holocaust happen? How could people elect a world leader like Hitler and turn a blind eye while so many were killed for nothing other than their beliefs? How?
Open your eyes to the world today. That is how. When things don't directly affect us, it's easy to turn a blind eye. Many of us are not in Aleppo or the Middle East -- we do not have to witness these crimes against humanity. We can elect someone like Donald Trump to be our leader because, to an increasingly smaller but opinionated group of certain American citizens, he speaks of a world in which they will best be benefited; those he mocks and threatens are not those who would vote for him. Those who can vote for him will not have their lives put in danger by his election, the same as so many Germans would not live in fear of their lives if Hitler was elected to office all those years ago. So it goes.
This is how history is made. This is how humanity is broken. When we choose to only acknowledge the socio-political events which affect us, we run the risk of lending our voices only to those we see ourselves in. But part of the beauty of the world is that we are all different, that we are a mess of cultures and traditions, growing more and more interconnected by the day. In the end, we are all simply citizens of the world. And we cannot sit back and turn a blind eye while our citizens are murdered. We cannot simply go on with our days and our lives and let this go on.
Call for military action. Call for the UN to take the stand they didn't with Rwanda. Call for President Obama to do something other than simply threaten Russia and its hackers. Call for a global conference to make sure that other countries and governments cannot murder innocent civilians in the name of world politics. Do not sit back and let this happen. Do not recognize that this is happening in real time and do nothing to fight it. Do not ignore the responsibility to be a good person, to be a fair person, to fight for what is just, what is right.
You cannot look back on this in fifty years and ask, How? How did we let this happen?
You cannot say we did not know.
