Over the past two weeks our campus has been inundated with information about the horrible things taking place in Africa. From Action Darfur to the symposium on human trafficking, the plight of the average citizen in Africa has been all around us, and most of you probably had no idea. I am willing to bet that if I stood out on the Quad and surveyed 1,000 random people, most of you might know that U2’s lead singer, Bono, is nominated for the Noble Peace Prize for his work in Africa, but have no idea what he is doing.

America needs to get off its collective apathetic ass and do something. According to Congressional reports, the United States is spending a mere four billion dollars to fund AIDS research around the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, 28.5 million people are infected with either HIV or AIDS – that’s about the number of people living in the greater metro areas of New York City, Chicago and Los Angles combined. The number is probably closer to 40 million for the continent as a whole, but the countries of North Africa will not release the number of people stricken with the disease in their countries.

In places such as Sudan and Sierra Leone, genocide is the reality facing many people on a daily basis. Yet people in the U.S. are more up in arms about Iran’s upcoming farce of a summit to explore the validity of the Holocaust than trying to do something about people that are getting shot as I sit at my computer and write this.

Since the only way to get some of my friends to care was to feed them Hollywood movies, let me feed you all a couple. Rent a movie like “Hotel Rwanda,” “Lord of War,” or “Tears of the Sun.” Instead of paying attention to the cool special effects or the stars of the movies, pay attention to the message. This country is all up in arms about Iranian propaganda but we don’t care at all that the spirit of Hitler lives on in the third world and has killed hundreds of thousands of people. I am not the most caring person in the world, but it even makes my blood boil to see a picture of an 11-year-old girl with an arm cut off because she was from the wrong side of the tracks. ÿ

While I have already hooked the more empathetic among you, I am now going to get the rest of you. If you have anything that has diamonds in it, odds are the diamonds came from Africa. If you have Firestone tires, the rubber came from Africa. Africa represents the largest untapped natural resource base in the world. China gets 28 percent of their oil from Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Fortune magazine, and they are racing to help those countries develop more oil fields. We are the most oil-dependent country in the world. Helping these countries makes sense from that angle alone. If you are tired of paying $2.28 for a gallon of gas, then start caring, and caring is easy.ÿ

Start by getting informed. Google search key words like “Africa,” “AIDS” or “genocide,” and start reading. Take an hour some day when you are bored and find out what is really going on. Then go to www.one.org and sign up. Just putting your name on that petition is doing something, buying the bracelet is doing just a little more. Write your congressional representatives an e-mail. It’s Politics 101 – if enough people in a voting block raise a fuss, the politician will do something. If this whole campus sent one e-mail apiece, that’s more than 40,000. I am not asking you to be a humanitarian (I’m not). But signing a petition, spending a buck, and writing a quick e-mail are all things you can do in less time then it took for you to read my column. Do them.ÿ

Tom Amenta is a sophomore in LAS. He is an internationally published writer, but only because he has a friend in the Peace Corps. His column appears on Mondays. He can be reached at [email protected].