I just finished this amazing book, Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron, that discusses the Rwandan genocide. And it’s horrifying and horrifyingly recent. After reading about something so intense, I think a natural reaction is, “Never again.” But that’s bullsh!t because it’s happened since then and it’s happening right now.

But without being informed about the past, you can’t fully understand the present. How we handle situations now can be informed by how the genocide was handled in Rwanda, the genocide in Cambodia, the genocide in Germany, and on and on.

The Kony 2012 video has been getting circulated a lot and there’s already a very noisy online conversation occuring about the value of that video. Will the video make a difference? Maybe, maybe not. Will people go beyond the video and learn more about Kony and Uganda? Maybe, maybe not. But if people watch that 30 minute video (and when I last checked, more than 80,000,000 people have), that’s 30 minutes more education than they had before.

I hope that the video does have an imact on Uganda because if it does, it lays out one way for people to make a difference. And if the video doesn’t have an impact, it still helps inform us for future situations. Eventually, maybe we’ll learn and “Never again” will be a true sentiment.

Running the Rift was a wonderful book that I can’t recommend enough. You can ead my full review of the book over at BookGeeks.

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.