Individual Action

Today in class we discussed the idea of interests, and how if a country has no interest in the country in which a genocide is happening, it most likely won't come to its aid. I was deeply saddened by the fact that in today's world, people no longer think it terms of human to human. They think economically, or strategically, or politically. Rather than first considering the immediate help we can provide to the suffering victims of genocide, we first consider what the benefits will be for our country. And many times, if there are none, the government will rule against involvement. Which, when we think about it, makes perfect sense it today's competitive world. If a country wants to get ahead, it can't always play nice; it cannot be moral all of the time. This made me realize that we cannot simply wait for a nation as a whole to act, or for our government to act. And I realized that the individual is, in fact, tremendously important. If a nation as a whole must do what is best for its people (which isn't necessarily wrong), then it is up to the individual to act on what is best for the victims of the genocide. If a nation cannot become involved in order to keep itself powerful and its citizens safe, then the responsibility falls onto the intermediaries and the individual. And honestly, from the film that we saw, the main intermediary (the UN) didn't exactly do much either. So in the end, it is really up to the individual to take action. Because an individual is responsible for themselves, and not for a whole country, they can at times make a much greater difference than an entire nation can.