Thoughts from my journey with Journey for Humanity

Today, a group of young Armenian adults called Journey for Humanity came to New York City as part of their national walking tour to raise genocide awareness and action. They have walked all the way across the country from LA to DC for this cause. We met at St. Vartan Cathedral this morning and walked to Times Square where we stood in somber silence, holding banners, handing out pamphlets, mindful of the history that has killed millions of people, in the midst of one of the busiest places on earth. Our presence in New York City was a bit of an anachronism, a living specimen of history in the eye of a storm of businesspeople, tourists, flashing lights and swirling sounds all whisking around Times Square. It was our walk, though, that made the event so powerful and moving.
When you first start walking somewhere, your mind is on where you’re going. But on a long walk, you begin to stop thinking about that, and sometimes you stop thinking in general. You get lost in your own thoughts. And so as we walked, I started to forget how cold my hands were, or how my feet were hurting, and my mind slowly shifted to the purpose of all this walking. We were walking to raise genocide awareness and action. Some people who passed us asked, “What’s genocide?” The fact that our ancestors, along with millions of other people from other races, have perished as a result of ethnic cleansing and there are STILL people walking the streets of New York who don’t know what the word “genocide” means made my steps more purposeful and my hands a little tighter around the banner I was holding. How can people not know? I thought to myself. How can people grow up not learning about the Armenians, the Jews, the Cambodians, the Bosnians, the Rwandans, and now not be aware of those perishing in Darfur at this very moment? How can people not know that time and time again, the world has turned its back on victims of genocide – or offered too little too late? And with each step I took, I thought about the steps my ancestors took. How their steps were steps toward despair, deportation, desolation and death. And how our steps were steps toward awareness, toward social justice, toward action, toward hope.
I thought about the phrase I was taught as a child: Those who ignore the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. Sadly, history’s mistakes have been repeated because perpetrators of genocide have not been held accountable for their crimes against humanity. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it silently allows these crimes to continue. By not holding perpetrators accountable, we are saying that crimes against humanity, the most vile of crimes, are crimes you can get away with. We are permitting them to happen again. Second, by allowing these crimes to recur and by allowing genocide denial and ignorance to continue, we fail to name these events “mistakes.” We fail to show the world that genocide is truly wrong and evil and intolerable. Until the entire world vows to stop perpetrators of genocide, it will continue.
It is thoughts like that, when I look at all that has gone wrong in the world, that make me wonder where the hope is. I asked a mentor of mine this once when I was feeling hopeless. I was working in an urban setting, in a well-to-do church surrounded by homelessness and poverty, and my mentor was criticizing me for making all my sermons too “fluffy” and not addressing the real issues of poverty. I got frustrated and sort of exploded at him. “Well what am I supposed to say? Where is the good news for these people? Their lives are horrible, they live on the street, they are cold at night and don’t have a pot to piss in! Where is the hope?” He looked at me and said, “The hope is in the people’s response. That is the gospel.”
I have taken that with me and it rang true today. The recurrence of genocide all over the world feels hopeless. It is a problem of colossal proportions. But by making people aware of it, we can hope that they will take action. I don’t necessarily have hope that ethnic cleansing and genocide will cease to be a problem in this world. But after today, after seeing the response of the people walking by us on the street, I have a little more hope that the word will spread and action might follow. I have hope that the efforts made today will have a ripple effect. Even though genocide might happen again, I have hope that there will come a point where the world will finally say, “no more.”