Blog Response #2

When I was younger, a man that went to my church had parents who were victims in the Armenian genocide. He didn’t talk about it that much, and what I heard was mostly second- or third-hand. I remember thinking of it in terms that it had happened almost in an “indistinct” time period. I was never really able to put it in perspective of where or when it happened. I vaguely knew that it was in Central or Eastern Europe, but beyond that, I hadn’t the slightest idea of when it happened, and where exactly Armenia was.

It’s hard to define an event or a period of history as something I “should” know about. I am a firm believer in the power of knowledge and information, but it certainly seems both unlikely and impossible that I could know about all, or even most, atrocities, and at some point, if it’s even doing me any good to know about all of them. There’s no doubt that knowing more about the world and having a greater perspective on global intra-culture should make me a more concerned and more responsible human, but there comes a time when the scales should tip from information gathering to action. Too frequently, more time is spent on discussing the degree of atrocity instead of taking direct action against it.

I’m glad I knew about it--for sure--but I felt so removed from the situation that I didn’t recognize (and probably still don’t) my place or ability to do anything about it. I wish I’d known more information, and what I could do as an active part of the world to prevent something like that from happening during my lifetime.