It has come to this. But maybe the “it” isn’t me… Hold on, we need some context:
Clooney recently had a dark-night-of-the-soul (or of the red wine, depending) with Time Magazine’s Joel Stein, about Darfur:
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“But now, just three weeks back from having a 14-year-old border guard shove a machine gun at his chest, after recovering from malaria, after helicoptering out of N’Djamena, Chad, in a sandstorm three days before the rebels sacked it, he wonders if his critics are right, if this scheme to use celebrity to bring attention to the world’s plights isn’t, if not vanity, at least striving after wind. “I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health-care facility and they’re a target for somebody,” he says. “A lot more people know about Darfur, but absolutely nothing is different. Absolutely nothing.”
Somewhere in the course of obsessively following news from Darfur, and in believing that even if celebrities like Clooney couldn’t make a difference maybe the smartest of the activist types could, I lost the ability to see the difference between activism and noise. It’s the right kind of noise—in my field, we call it ‘speaking on behalf of the voiceless’ or something equally self-serving; I don’t know what the advocates call it. “Raising awareness,” I would guess.
And I genuinely believe there’s good in that. But who are we talking to? And do the people whom we’re talking for think it matters?
A slightly different way of putting this point: During the campaign for divestment from Darfur, someone working closely with the government of Sudan told me that all this American youth activism confused Khartoum; the Sudanese president couldn’t imagine why the most powerful man in the world, as they characterize Bush, would ever listen to a bunch of college kids.
One response to this is to say, “That’s the beauty of our democracy.” But that’s a congratulatory way of missing the point. Which is the same one Clooney was making when he worried about turning the people he helps into targets: Even when your noise is the voice of the voiceless, the signal can get lost. At best, when that happens, you simply don’t do any good. At worst, you do damage.
This is not the end of this idea — it’s way too pessimistic a thought to end on — but it does have to be the end of this post. To be continued, hopefully with lots of ideas from you.
PS: It’s a great article, and the only part about Darfur is the excerpted one. Otherwise, it’s a light, funny read.
