"scream" for Darfur

On Sunday I went to an anti-genocide protest called "Scream for Darfur" held at Queen's Park in downtown T.O. The turnout was rather pathetic contrary to the organisers' insistence on it being fantastic. More importantly, you would think the monumental humanitarian disaster that is occurring in Darfur (400000 people dead and counting, 2 million people displaced) would mobilize more citizens. It's been all over the news and recently George Clooney jumped on the bandwagon and proclaimed his outrage (though he didn't scream into the microphone, like Jack Layton did). There has to be at least as many diehard Clooney fans in Toronto as there were demonstrators.

I don't think the Clooney crowd showed up. The folks assembled were mostly of the "Kumbaya" left: the love-not-war, white-peeps-with-dreads crowd. I was mostly annoyed by them, but in fairness, they did show up (the event was kickstarted by highschoolers) even though it seemed most people didn't really understand the depravity of the issue. Also, at every opportunity, the organisers insisted on asking if we were having a good time, telling us what a good time they were having, what a nice afternoon it was, and urging us to relax and party, which seemed highly inappropriate considering we were there to protest a genocide, and a clearcut failure of the international community. The local Darfuris (Darfurians?) stood by stoically, perplexed by this display of vacuous freedom. A band consisting of a rapper, a guitarist and a congo player, droned on endlessly before the speakers lined up to talk. The lyrics (delivered with an Eminem Detroit accent) were mostly about how we should stop oppressing all organisms of the earth. The guy insisted on using the term "organisms" over and over. It would be nice if we first stopped oppressing homo sapiens.

You can get pictures and an accurate summary here.