I participated in the Day of Silence today at school, and wrote the following statement to explain my participation to others:

As you may know, today, April 25 2008, is the Day of Silence, a national movement calling attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who must endure bullying and other harassment. But my silence in specific is also to call attention to all the silent victims on this planet: the millions of victim in Darfur, Iraq, and other areas of crisis, the hundreds of millions who face malnutrition worldwide, the billions who live in poverty; all the forgotten people of the world in general, as well as all those who will suffer in the future from the problems we have forced ourselves to forget. For 365 days a year, we are silent on these problems. I can only regret that my own silence will be for but one day.

I realized that the silence faced by LGBT people are not confined just to them, but are a symptom of our problems as a nation. As Americans, we tend to focus on ourselves and pay less attention to the world as a whole. When Congress debates on leaving Iraq, it considers the hardships faced by our soldiers and their families, and the costs that we must pay. But although these are legitimate concerns, none dare to speak the fact that over a million Iraqi civilians have already died, directly or indirectly, from our invasion. We value the lives of our citizens far more highly than those of other nations. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, we donated billions of dollars to charity organizations to help the victims. A few months later, an earthquake struck the region of Kashmir, killing tens of thousands of Indians and Pakistani. I could not help but compare our responses to the two events: the U.N. struggled to raise enough funds to find relief for the earthquake victims, and it is doubtful that the response would have been similarly tepid had the disaster occurred in California instead.

Our silence is not confined to international events, but also to ourselves. In order to maintain the illusion that we are the greatest nation on the planet, many Americans have chosen to remain silent on problems in this country ranging from healthcare to foreclosures. For if ignorance is bliss, what does that make knowledge and wisdom? It is easier for many to believe that our healthcare system is working perfectly fine than to realize just how terrible it is. It is easier for Bush to claim that our economy is booming than for him to realize how bad of a state it is in. The last president who was brave enough to end the silence was Carter, and we turned him out of office for his courage in confronting the energy crisis.

The reason that I have a great deal of respect for politicians such as Russ Feingold and John Edwards are that they were brave enough to try and end the silence, to call attention to at least some the problems that we need to fix. I supported Edwards for president because he tried to end the silence on poverty, on healthcare, on education. And in response to his audacity in breaking the silence, our media chose to silence his campaign.

We have chosen to ignore the millions who suffer from political conflict worldwide, whether in Iraq, Darfur, Kenya, Zimbabwe, or other areas. We have chosen to ignore the billions who face poverty worldwide, including millions in our own nation. Although some of us may have done otherwise, we as a nation have chosen to ignore them, and so we must bear the guilt for our actions. On problems ranging from global warming to peak oil, millions of Americans have taken the path of silence; rather than recognize that we have a serious problem, we choose to ignore them in the vain hope that they do not exist. By choosing to forget them, we force them upon our children and descendants; it is a trend that cannot be sustained for long.

On this website, many of us have been so caught up in the presidential campaign that we have forgotten the reasons that the website was created in the first place. No matter what you may think, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are good people, and either of them would be far better than a McCain presidency. Electing a Democrat would be the first step in ending the silence.