Is the World Really that Terrible?

Well I'm drifting away from music completely with this post but it's been something that has been bothering me for the past few months. About a month or so ago my High School basketball team went to the state championship so I decided I would go along and root for my old High School team, I even went as far as having my paint chested because they needed one more person to spell out our school name. Now I live in a town that is 99% white with a very small black population. I had about one or two black kids in my graduating class out of around 300 or so. When we got to the game we were playing a team which had all black kids on it where as our team was all white. While the game was going on all the kids from my old High School were just making up racist chants, I became disguisted. I couldn't believe that I lived in a town full of racists. Every chant they created was derrogitory to blacks, and I was appauled, so appauled that I was happy our team was beaten badly. On top of that the past few months I have been working on a 25 minute presentation I had to give about a book of my choice dealing with International Relations. I have this odd obsession with Africa and always have, even in Elementary school we were told to choose a country to write a report on and I chose Mozambique. I mean who chooses Mozambique? Well back to the topic I ended up choosing a book by Philip Gourevitch which was about the Rwanda Genocide. I was familiar with the genocide but certainly was no expert on it considering I wasn't even ten years old when it occured. The book was incredible and I ended up having a solid presentation. While reading the book it wasn't the genocide that made me sick to my stomach but it was realizing how racist of a world we live in. I know many people will read this and think "Oh just another person pulling out the race card." During the genocide the world had an oppurtunity to help a country left in shambles thanks to a Belgian country who completely polarized the two main ethnicities of Rwanda. Eventually the polarization reached a height which led to the extermination of all Tutsis. As I said earlier the world just sat and watched nearly a million people being killed maliciously with machetes, not even with a more humane weapon such as guns. President Clinton avoided at all costs calling this event a genocide so he wouldn't have to intervene. Not only are we to blame America but the whole world who had a chance to save nearly one million lives. Countries like Italy did come in to save people but the people they saved were WHITE and only white! So when these soldiers came in to rescue the white people the blacks just had to stand there and watch these upperclass white people being rescued and flown away from the destruction. When watching videos of the genocide I nearly cried when I saw these little black children watching white people being flown out of the area to safety. It gets me so angry to know that we live in a world filled with racism. If these genocides were occuring in white European countries would we intervene? If a massive hurricane hit a rich white community would the rescue efforts be more succesful? Without any doubt in my mind I say yes! No life is of lesser value then the next, President Bush's life is no more important then the homeless guy living on the sidewalks of New York City. One day I can only hope that we will live in a world where race is not even the slightest of an issue. To think that racism was an issue of the 60's is completely wrong, it is an issue that started when European explorers ventured out into Africa and it is an issue to this very day.