The Cruelest Month
Nobel Prize winner Thomas Eliot has called April “the cruelest month.”
I live three miles away from Columbine, the High School in the United States were a massacre of a dozen took place on April 20, 2007.
I am Armenian, whose extended family was destroyed in the WWI genocide that started in April of 1915.
I am a board director of the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness and Action that tomorrow will applaud a Holocaust commemoration resolution at the Colorado State Capitol tomorrow and will be present at the singing ceremony of the Sudan divestment bill – to help stop the genocide in Darfur – coming Thursday.
I am a friend of Tutsi survivors, whose families were killed in April of 1994 in the Rwandan genocide,
I am preparing a group presentation for tomorrow on comfort women based on the account of Maria Rosa Henson, a 15-year old child during WWII who was captured by the Japanese army in April of 1943 to become a sex slave (there were 200,000 women and children like her),
I fear April. I fear it a lot. On Saturday I told some friends I hope Turkish military units don’t attack Northern Iraq and start butchering Kurds. It’s April, after all. The month when Hitler was born, the month that has so much injustice to remember and commemorate. And the month of, “never again.”
It was also several hours ago, in April, that over 30 students were massacred in Virginia Tech university. It is still April.
But is it April that makes humans inhuman or humans that make April inhuman? Is April more powerful than all of us? Are guns more powerful in America than Americans to regulate its use and easily prevent massacres like the Michigan Tech? Are we, humans, free? Are we free of ourselves, from our history of demonizing April?
Can we start with gun control in April and continue by stopping denial of historical injustices, like the sexual slavery of WWII women by the Japanese army? Why are YouTube videos about WWII “comfort women” being removed in April, such as a photo presentation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yc18Wx-txE.
So many questions and no answers. I am just tired. Tired of our cover-up of April. Tired of making April the cruelest month of the year. Tired of making ourselves fear April.
fethiye on 17 Apr 2007 at 7:37 pm #
As I Turk, I hope Turkish army will not go in to Northern Iraq as well. But if they do, they will not be butchering Kurds; please do not distort they reasons to go in there. If you knew anybody that was affected by the PKK terrorism, you will understand the Turkish military’s stand against the governments and body of people who are harboring PKK.