new years resolution: think

I am impulsive and I tend to privilege action over thought. That is how I ended up in the Peace Corps :P
Not a good thing for an aspiring activist and scholar.
It's just that sometimes only thinking feels so useless, and in my impatience to see change, I change.

I just read the first chapter of Mahmood Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, in which he critiques the Save Darfur Coalition, the very organization that got me interested in politics.

It brings back memories of my high school excursion to the Holocaust Museum, and how upon exiting, my face still wet with tears, I eagerly purchased a bunch of green "Save Darfur" bracelets from the gift shop, determined to do something in order to remedy the guilt of privilege, of being able to simply view a history of the horrific, by actively being part of something grand and moral.

I never really looked past this coalition's grand narratives of "never again," etc. and thus did not see the implications of failing to contextualize and understand the conflict in Darfur, or even to recognize the politics of power in naming certain violent "events" genocide.

This failure on my part is a personal lesson I hope to translate to my impulse to defend, to help, "to save," women from gender violence. Think, Kacie, think. The first step toward doing the right thing is to avoid doing the wrong thing.