Feeling White

Today I was watching Oprah, I hardly ever watch Oprah. I think that I have mixed feelings about the TV empress. Granted she does speak on behalf of many who would otherwise not be heard. But sometimes I feel like she offers us another way to look at the world and feel all white and safe. Regardless of my feelings for her, I must say that after watching her show today I started thinking.
All my life I have wanted to go to Africa. It wasn’t until high school that I figured out which part of Africa that I wanted to go to. Uganda. You see the boy that I was sort of seeing wanted to go there and we planned to ditch North America after high school and go work somewhere in Uganda. Well that never happened. Neither he nor I have made it off of this continent.
I want to go there because of the tragedies that are ensuing in the wake of the raids of the LRA (the Lord’s Resistance Army). And this is exactly what was on Oprah today. A man named Joseph Kony runs the LRA. And like Rasputin, believes he is a messenger of god. The LRA raids villages, wiping out complete families from great-grandparents to grandchildren. They kidnap teenagers and children and force them to be soldiers and sex slaves. Boys who are not yet thirteen are forced to kill family members, friends and strangers. Girls are forced to marry soldiers or are used as concubines. They keep the children there by driving fear into their souls. They tell them not to think of home, their families or their friends because if they do and the LRA finds out, they say they will kill them. They mean it. Another way that they keep the children from running away is by beating them. They beat them and keep them within inches of death, that way they aren’t strong enough to make a full escape.
The ones that get away are left with horrible physical reminders of the cruelty and malice of their former captors. They arrive at rescue camps missing lips and noses and limbs, you name it. Women arrive 9 months pregnant or with babies fathered by one of the men that gang-raped her when her village was raided. They have scars all over their bodies from being cut with glass and from the extensive beatings. A generation is being ruined right before our eyes and we don’t care.
I finished watching Oprah and then I cried all the way through “Gilmore Girls”. I went upstairs and tried to forget the statistics and the horror that I had known for ages. I went upstairs feeling with part of me feeling so righteous and white, you see one day I was going to go to Uganda and help fix the problem. I had supported one or two missionaries in my day, and all I wanted to do was pat myself on the back. I sat down at the dinner table and started to feel sick, I had become like them—I had become the very person that I hated. I became the person who watched TV, agrees that something has to be done and leaves someone else to do it. I felt so hypocritical, so white. For dinner I ate my white chicken with my white French fries, my white salad dressing and chased it all down with white ice cream. I felt sick!
My thoughts are filled with the mission that God gives all of humanity. We are called to speak for the unheard, to give to the least of these. God calls us to a purpose beyond ourselves, and it is within my own self that I have been living. My thoughts flooded toward heaven. When I see God on judgment day will I be faced with my chosen blindness? I was faced with my humanity and did not want to be on this earth, simply because it was filled with people like me. I truly believe that God does not want us to sit in silence while His children and our brothers and sisters face horror. Ignorance is not bliss.
I think that Satan’s greatest tool is to make us self-absorbed so that we cannot see beyond our own pathetic existence. He twists us and manipulates us so that every way we turn we only see ourselves. God wants to do the opposite he wants to let us crawl outside of ourselves in a world that desperately needs Him. When you go to bed tonight, pray that you would be removed from yourself and that God would let you see the world through His eyes. Then take action.