On Jan. 12 of this year, the ground beneath the feet of millions of Haitians violently shook and disrupted their lives forever. The statistics are gruesome with 200,000 estimated dead and another 1.5 million left without any formidable shelter. Overnight, from our home communities to provinces we’d never heard of prior, we, as a world, lent our hands full of care and favor to the people of Haiti. This wasn’t an exclusive reaction. We took the same charge in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and to the hurricanes of New Orleans in 2005. It is in these spotlights of awareness that we seem to rise and conquer. When it is up to our awareness to persist, however, we unfortunately seem to grow ever dimmer.

Before Jan. 12, how many people were able to point Port-au-Prince out on a map? I’d wonder that number to be very few. What’s unsettling to think, though, is how many  people will be able to pick out Haiti in just a few months from now, but not know its state of affairs. After all, when was the last time our front pages printed a story about the current situation in Sudan?      

The last time I remember seeing the media truly take aim at Darfur was when the genocide broke out in February of 2003. I had not yet entered high school — and as a side note, it was in late 2005 that the U.N. first used the term genocide instead of “civil dispute” and “mass killing.” However, it was during my high school years that an excitement to defeat a beckoning tragedy struck my peers. We emerged in the form of an after school group attempting to find the best way to garner funding that could be appropriated to organizations such as savedarfur.org or Doctors Without Borders. We sought to be the hitch that would bind our resources to the region’s need. Our first attempts were basic: petitioning, bake sales, raffles. Our success, in retrospect, was even basic, earning only nearly $3,000 to donate. The following year, using the same methods, we raised half that amount. Another year, with new and improved methods, we raised a third of that. Then it dawned on us that it wasn’t news any longer — that even mass killing could grow old to some people; and evidently it had.      

During the last seven years, more than 400,000 Darfurians have lost their lives and another 2.5 million have lost all possession or privacy, according to Human Rights Watch. From afar, we’ve sent over “logical assistance.” We’ve walked annually around our nation’s capital. We’ve worn T-shirts to spread this untenable concept of awareness about the world. We’ve ultimately done nothing. Some may protest with figures of donated funds from collegiate organizations such as STAND or Amnesty who have fought long and hard to try and push that spotlight back on Darfur. In the end, our awareness that we attempt to pride ourselves with has resulted in being able to identify Sudan on a map.  Our awareness has been a seven-year-long geography lesson.      

I’m not saying the efforts put forth have not been essential or have not propagated a great deal of change, but that we’ve no longer kept an enforced awareness for our greater world. We are reacting far too singularly. Prior to the earthquake, Haiti wasn’t a wellspring of life — the same way that prior to the Sudanese genocide the country was still recovering from a second civil war. Yet during these moments of need in the world, our awareness wasn’t in any sort of forefront. It always seems to take a sudden blow to resuscitate our attention. If we are ever going to alter the present, we are going to have to learn how to actually make something out of our awareness — not merely act when the trend is popular.  

Scott Gloden  is a senior writing major. E-mail him at sgloden1@ithaca.edu.