Darfur

Yes, things are getting worse.

The war in the Sudan has spilled over the borders into Chad.

And that means that there are refugees from Chad spilling over the border into Sudan.

Hint to those of you playing along at home. Things are not getting any better.

I entirely sympathize with the perspective of "African solutions for African problems but I can't see any solutions appearing. Only a bitter clinging to the past. A stubborn determination to cast blame before all else. I see eyes pointed resolutely backward, instead of toward the future.

At what point do you overrule a country's, almost a continent's wishes and intervene? Never?

Is autonomy a thing to be respected under all circumstances? No?

Where do you draw the line? Do you read these stories and conclude that Africa has, as so many of us do these days, the bad luck to be currently led by people afflicted with a blind, angry determination to see only the reality they want to see?

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I am prepared to offer an incredibly generous moratorium. An amnesty, in fact.

From now on, no one in the world is allowed to start a fracas over anything that happened more than 50 years ago. (I was going to make it 25, giving myself the luxury of blaming everything that's wrong with the world on the Reagan Administration, but then I decided to be reasonable.) (More reasonable, anyhow.)

Israel exists. Enough with the fights over having stolen the land. (This is a tough one for me, personally.) Palestine, the entire Middle East, will have to learn to live with the existence of a Jewish state in their midst. Israel will have to learn to live with the reality that it exists in the midst of hostile powers.

Western empire-building happened. A lot of sins were committed along the way. Let's just all agree that little of it passes a Smell Test in 2006 and focus on how we're going to progress from here.

Slaves escaped from the USofA, fled to Haiti, and started an independent nation. Yes. Slaves ran away and got away with it. Get over it and stop meddling in Haiti's affairs. Countries have the right to select their own governments. They even have the right to elect, and then re-elect really shitty Administrations.

Ancient civilizations on the American continents were decimated and destroyed by Western "civilizations." I, myself, with my mixed heritage of German, English, African-American, and American Indian heritage am both conqueror and conquered. Because I must co-exist with me, I do not spend my life beating half myself up about it. The past cannot be changed. It can only be improved upon.

Repressive totalitarian governments contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. As do all systems of government. Stop funding terrorists and militias under the guise of bringing down an evil government. Evil is not destroyed with evil, but if you do evil, you become evil.