13 Years Old

Nearly 1 AM in D.C. .... time to sleep, a few hours away from another day of work. Tomorrow I will write a paper and create a PowerPoint presentation; a paper about the Rwandan genocide...an event that killed an estimated 800000 people, a genocide known well for its ferocious pace more than anything else and the fact that in 1994 the world simply could not comprehend what was going on, information came too late...thinking about that, if we had facebook then lives could have been saved. I was 13 years old then and the Rwandan genocide meant nothing to me and frankly no one in India cared to tell us what was going on, i had other problems at 13, puberty, moving to a different town, making new friends and generally being bad at soccer(luckily so was everyone else I knew...there is a good reason why a nation of a billion is not represented in the soccer world cup) ...but i digress; someone was 13 when the Nazis were killing a few million, when Pol Pot was being well Pol Pot, and every year someone is 13 years old when Darfur continues and when the Democratic Republic of Congo fails to gain even a semblance of democracy. So genocides, holy wars,ethnic cleansing, civil wars, man-made famines all continue with a few million 13 year olds with pimples and puberty.
Just hoping some day some one else when its 1 AM in D.C. (or Delhi) can say that when he or she was 13 a few million did not die in a genocide, a holy war or man-made famines......
Peace