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After reading Kristof I realized that it wasn't the Cambodian pieces themselves that bothered me. I have nothing but sympathy for the people telling these horrible stories as individuals. We all need to hear their stories, and understand to the bone the brutality human beings are capable of, so we can't ever wallow in the excuse that we don't believe such things can happen. But together the pieces on the horror of the Khmer Rouge leave an impression that such crimes are something we have nothing to do with, and that the only crimes that count are the ones that happen after we walk away. Kristof merely voices what was already implicit in the collection, without context, of the three essays: The United States must save the world from monsters.
And that allows us to wallow in the belief that while human rights crimes may be committed, they never happen when we're around. That's a lie, and a dangerous one.
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Over the next few weeks, I'll running to the store to buy tacky glue, and posterboard, and tempura, and whatever else my daughter needs to build her little gulag on the kitchen table. I'm hoping to avoid the sugar cube option, but it's her project, her call. I doubt I'll tell her about Father Quintana. I don't even let her watch PG-13 movies. I don't want to spoil her project. She's 10, and unlike Kristof and whoever wrote the gooey pamphlet from the Santa Cruz mission, she's entitled to the innocence of being 10.
But at some point I want her to understand how many of her privileges rest on old, half-forgotten crimes. Because if she doesn't understand that, whoever plays Nicholas Kristof's part in her generation will have no difficulty convincing her that the world is full of monsters to be slain, and the only danger is the refusal to build the mechanisms to slay them.
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