Perspective is a funny thing in that it changes all the time.  For much of my adult life I’ve always felt fortunate to have lived during a time that I thought must be the most enlightened of all human history.  After all we have the benefit of lessons learned from all the generations of humans that preceded us.

Then I read, see or hear something that makes me question our enlightenment.  Here’s just one such event, a Frontline profile of the genocide in Rwanda back in the mid-90s.

I remember vividly reading about the genocide in the paper, as it was happening.  I remember thinking, "How can we, that is human beings, allow something like this to happen?"

When reading about the Holocaust I used to think the reason the Nazi’s were able to pull it off is that most of humanity was ignorant of what was going on.  People still argue about that, but I KNOW that the genocide in Rwanda was not a deep dark secret, and yet we let it happen.  I read about it in the Washington Post every day.

Given that the Holocaust occured only 50 years before the genocide in Rwanda we can’t even claim that something like this had not happened in recent times so we could not expect to be prepared to respond to such an event. No, we simply allowed it to happen.  Again.

You may wonder why I keep saying we.  It’s really very simple.  My theory is that we allow atrocities to happen because we think they happen to others.  We allow them to happen because they are really not like us.  They are Jewish, they are African, they are Cambodian, they are not us.  Until we begin to think of ourselves as members of the same extended family on this little life raft we call Earth, then we will never avoid repeating the sins of our past.  We will never attain enlightenment.