The XX Factor: What women really think.

Shamed by "Sand and Sorrow"

Our son insisted that we watch Sand and Sorrow on HBO last night, and I am filled with shame after seeing it: Not only has our government done little to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur, but have I so much as dropped a note to my elected representatives? No. There are schoolgirls in Batavia, Ill., who have done more to raise awareness about the some 400,000 innocents who have died in the province since 2003, when the Sudanese government began sending the janjaweed in to crush a rebel movement by slaughtering the region's non-Arab civilian population. President Bush correctly labeled the situation but was slow to do anything more, and the film suggests that that's partly because the CIA thinks it is getting such good al-Qaeda intell out of the government in Khartoum. (Quality stuff like this? Or on the contrary this? Or in any case this?)

One of the African Union observers sent in to watch and take notes is living the experience of the Nick Nolte character in Hotel Rwanda. He returns to his barracks at day's end and doesn't always feel like eating, because the kids he's seen all day are going hungry. In his tent at night, he's freezing under two blankets but can't sleep for thinking of the families not far away who don't even have one to share. On a daily basis, people who live in Darfur must decide whether it is better to send women and girls out to look for firewood—knowing they might be gang-raped—or men, who would be killed. But the real question for the rest of us, as Harvard's Samantha Power says in the documentary, is which country is going to send in real troops with a real mandate to do more? Any hands there in the back? Not so far, and this slow-motion horror show has been playing out for four years already.

Until we step up, even humanitarian aid is hard to get where it needs to go. In an op-ed this morning in the Wall Street Journal, Mia Farrow quotes Oxfam's director in Sudan, Alun MacDonald: "Our staff are being targeted on a daily basis. They are being shot, robbed, beaten and abducted." The security situation, he insisted, "is the worst since the entire conflict began." Seven aid workers were killed in October, according to Macdonald. "These aren't conditions we can keep working in." What would it take to change those conditions? The political will, of course. The movie includes footage of Barack Obama taking the lead on this issue in Congress, along with now-former presidential aspirant Sam Brownback.