Recently, I have been home and have found myself not doing much of anything. I have had a week or so to kill until I started working again, and I made the decision to watch a couple of movies that have been on my to-do list. One of those movies includes the movie "Blood Diamond." For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, Blood Diamond is a 2006 film directed by Edward Zwick, that includes a cast staring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly. The film centers around two characters Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is a mercenary, and Soloman Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a fisherman. The time period of the movie is set during the civil war in Sierra Leon.
This movie was both fascinating and gut wrenching (much like the movie "Traffic"). This movie makes you think about our culture in a new light. As a society, we don't ask the questions that we need to ask. We live in a culture that doesn't know where our products come from, and we don't care. Kids in third world countries make our clothing for small and unlivable wages, and shocker, we get our diamonds from countries in conflict. We as people paid for Sierra Leon's civil war through these conflict diamonds. We put money in the pockets of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) which then put weapons in children's hands.
While Blood Diamond may have been fiction, it was based on reality. Those situations were real. The RUF used children to fight and violence tore Sierra Leon apart, and other than a couple of pictures in newspapers, Americans didn't give it a second thought. Have times changed? Of course not. We are so desensitized to the outside world that it is sickening.
What happened to compassion and social justice America? Instead of building walls and blocking refugees, lets be an inclusive society and work towards global peace.
Now at this point, you are probably thinking "This is too political, you are being too preachy" — My Mom. That is not my intention in writing this. The truth is we as a society don't ask the questions, this doesn't exclude me, and as much as I want to say we will ask the questions one day, I am not naive, we won't.
We fix in to what is in front of us; our day-to-day lives: work, school, social. It is hard to break out of the cycle and think about world problems. There is only one way to break the cycle, we need to think for ourselves. As a society, we need to ask the questions: Who is making my shoes? Is this diamond in this engagement ring a conflict diamond? And after that, do you care? Will you do something about it? Once you ask those questions, you will discover the type of person you are.
