Moral Superiority

A few weeks ago we all heard how the University’s Board decided not to divest from Darfur. Though certainly not happy with that decision, I was neither surprised nor particularly saddened. I wasn’t surprised because, hey, this is the UofC board of stodgy unconnected intellectuals, and nobody was really expecting anything less of them.

I wasn’t particularly saddened, however, because looking at it rationally, divestment does very little. Yes, it “sends a message,” and it could be argued that it grants “us,” whatever we are as a collective, the moral high ground. But in reality, we’re talking about divesting less than one million dollars from multibillion dollar, multinational or state-owned firms. They wouldn’t notice.

Though I respect what STAND has done and continues to do on campus, the fact of the matter is that their actions would do almost nothing to end the actual genocide, whether or not they actually achieved their policy goals. The only thing that divestment would actually accomplish is making some people feel good about themselves, and give them the ability to say, “I told you so.”

I’m quite sure that the family of one of the hundreds of thousands dead in Darfur is not completely comforted by the fact that some first-world people are very sorry for what’s happening to them and their people. In fact, I’d wager that they’d prefer some action to lessen the genocide over the united first world saying that we’re really sorry and do not at all support what is happening.

While having the moral high ground may help some of us watching the horror feel better about ourselves, it’s doing nothing for the actual victims. I think that a grief-stricken mother would prefer her son back than to have some more people express their apologies and do no more, no matter whether that mother is from Darfur, or is from the United States with her son in a flag-draped coffin flying back from Baghdad on an Army cargo plane.

The sad fact about the genocide in Darfur is that there’s very little that an individual, or even a group of students or activists, can do about it. The same cannot be said about ending the war in Iraq. Whether through direct action or through the Congress, the people of the United States have the ability to bring an end to the Iraqi War, and every day we chose not to, we become culpable for more and more deaths.

Look back for a second to the 1972 presidential election. Richard Nixon wins on a promise to end the Vietnam war, a platform he’s forced to adopt because of George McGovern’s promise of immediate withdrawal. The same George McGovern that beat Muskie, Humphrey, and Wallace in the primaries on the strength of one of the first real grassroots campaigns, on the backs of people who were willing to work to bring their friends, lovers, brothers, and sons back from a lost cause in the jungles of Vietnam.

We have the same power in 2008 as the students, the progressives, the caring of this nation had in 72. We can force this war to end, whether or not we win the presidency (which we will, but that’s for another column).
But even if the war ends in two years, that’s two years of dead friends, of dead sons and daughters, which is two years too many. Congress has been talking about a nonbinding resolution expressing their displeasure over the war. It passed the House, and failed a procedural vote in the Senate, with 53 supporting (not the 60 needed to force a vote), so a majority of both houses supported this resolution.

Of course, the resolution was nonbinding, and our dear President could, and all but said he would, completely ignore the will of Congress and the directive of the American people, and not only continue the war but send more soldiers into the mouth of Hell, leaving us to watch in dismay as yet another hero fell.

In that sense, the resolution and divestment are exactly the same thing. The people of America, the people of the world, have stood up, made their disapproval heard, and watched in dismay as the horrors continued. The tragedy has lead us to conclude what must be a central ideal of this new progressive movement, the one that can actually hold power in this country: Moral superiority is no longer enough.

Moral superiority is divesting from Darfur, is a nonbinding resolution. Moral superiority is setting things up se we can se “We told you so.” And moral superiority does nothing at all to save somebody’s son or daughter’s life. While it is certainly a tragedy that we cannot do more in Darfur (even the UN is powerless because of Sudan’s government), we can do more to end the war in Iraq. We, through Congress, hold the pursestrings. We control the billions of dollars that this war needs to continue.

Call your Congressman, call your Senator. Get the word out that cutting the purse does nothing to harm the troops, to endanger our friends, lovers, sons and daughters, beyond force the executive to bring them home. We can win this battle and end this war, before 2008. We cannot, and we must not, remain content with this war being a “Republican” problem, with us saying “We told you so.” Because even if it’s good for us politically, even if it gets us the Presidency, it costs us in lives, a trade-off that no progressive can make.

Moral superiority is not enough anymore, friends. We must act, we must see results. Central to the progressive movement is the belief that we can improve people’s lives. I put forth that there’s no better way to do this than by saving them.

May the God of your choice bless you,
Benediktion