Asking for trouble — and then finding it

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/02/2024 (586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whenever I overhear someone in public exclaiming “things just couldn’t get any worse,” I want to duck and look for cover.

It seems to me they are tempting fate. Some sleepy demigod somewhere wakes up when those words are spoken, and then ensures that things get worse. I don’t want to be collateral damage from a thunderbolt that strikes out of a blue sky in response.

It is hard to convince people in crisis, people who believe they have lost everything, that they could lose even more.

Worse and better are comparisons. Things get better or worse compared to how they are at the moment. Wanting the situation to improve is entirely natural and reasonable; expecting things won’t get worse, without doing something, is merely wishful thinking.

So, whenever I head out of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I always walk down through the genocide and Holocaust exhibits. Having spent time high up in the air, thinking and writing, my walk back down to ground level reminds me that such peace is a privilege, however much we wish it was a right.

On the way, I always touch the clasped hands of the statue of the young girl, memorializing the Holodomyr — the starvation of millions of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union. (If thousands of Jets fans can polish Timothy Eaton’s boot, for luck, perhaps in time there will be a similar shine on her hands that reflects our commitment to reject genocide, everywhere.)

I look into the eyes of the man about to be executed, at the side of a pit filled with bodies, carefully holding a coat folded over one arm, clinging with disbelief to normalcy in the midst of hell. I see the faces of children, on all sides, twisted by the experiences their elders have forced upon them.

These displays remind me, that however bad things might be for us today, they can always get worse. Yet they can also get better — if we work at it. The more pieces there are, the harder it is to put them back together — harder, but not impossible.

As we look around the world right now, global attention is focused on the suffering in Gaza/Palestine, on more death in the trenches and fields of Ukraine, and it is easy to feel powerless in response.

Yet there are other places where we are not so powerless to effect a change, to make a difference. Sudan descended into civil war in April 2023, as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia squared off against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The Sudanese people wanted nothing to do with either side. They had been working and protesting — and suffering — toward a democratic society since they had forced their last dictator to resign.

But what they wanted didn’t matter. A couple of years ago, some of them probably felt the situation in Sudan couldn’t get any worse — and yet it did. There are now about 10 million displaced persons, many internally. People have fled the violence, creating new crises on the borders of Sudan, where some of the largest refugee camps in the world were already located (in Darfur).

Some of these humanitarian problems have been pushed onto neighbouring countries, like South Sudan. One of the poorest countries in the world as well as one of the newest, it can’t cope with the stream of refugees escaping ethnic and tribal violence. But no one is doing anything to change the situation. The African Union has not put muscle behind its protests, and the world has looked away. Realistically, chaos in Sudan is profitable for some players abroad, which is why the conflict is perpetuated, and not stopped.

Aid was promised, as the fighting broke out, but to date only 40 per cent of it has been delivered. News conference promises are cheap and easily forgotten, and so the Sudanese people suffer while we do little or nothing. And, without protection, it is too dangerous for international aid organizations to operate in Sudan or its neighbours.

Unfortunately, Canada is rudderless in foreign affairs these days. We have no coherent policy, no clear principles that bring us down from the human-rights clouds to deal with ground-level reality in places like Sudan. We can add South Sudan to that list of troubled places, just as more conflict brews in the DRC, in Somalia, Yemen and Eritrea/Ethiopia. It would take very little to set the whole region ablaze, at great cost to everyone, and yet still we dither.

We are willing to spend trillions on war, guaranteeing our children will inherit a bombed-out, over-heated shell of what our world used to be.

How much thought and money are we willing to spend on deliberately creating a better future — knowing that things can always get worse, if we don’t try?

» Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba. This column originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.