It’s our third art show weekend at the New Albanian Brewing Company, Rich O’s Public House and Sportstime Pizza, and this time there's a twist.
NABC's Hoosier Daddy Art Show this weekend (May 10th,11th & 12th).
It bears repeating that I’m very proud of our twenty-something employees for their hard work in organizing these events, and equally impressed with their unimpeachable success at mixing the arts with commerce, entertainment (and craft beer), and coming up with an increasingly popular concept. It annoys me to no end that geezers my age and older insist on blustering that the “younger generation” is in some way lacking in gravitas.
It simply isn’t true.
To the contrary, I posit that there at least one trait evident in many of our younger employees – one just as noticeably lacking on the part of the aging barstool philosophers at Hooter’s – is more than a mere semblance of social conscience. My contemporaries are prone to scoff at such interests as naïve or dilettantish, and to me, this is nothing more than proof of their own obliviousness to a world they won't, or can't, comprehend.
NABC’s Kallie Crume is heavily involved in the effort to persuade an apathetic local populace that there is something fundamentally skewed about its ongoing failure to acknowledge the tragic situation in the Darfur region of Sudan, where approximately 400,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million more displaced by brutal government sponsored militias over a period of years unsurprisingly paralleling those of America’s involvement in Iraq.
Call it civil war, or ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Know that whatever it is called, Sudan’s government supports the militias that are doing the killing. Reflect that the biggest source of investment in Sudan is China – chief supplier of plastic trinkets to Wal-Mart. Run along to watch “American Idol” or grab a half-dozen Big Bufords – but don’t tell Kallie and others that they didn’t tell you so. If she doesn’t slap you, I might.
At 4:00 p.m. today, Kallie and the art show crew will be showing Darfur Diaries, a documentary film that chronicles the “worsening political and humanitarian crisis” in Darfur. Afterwards, Kallie and Bob Brousseau, co-founder of the Kentuckiana Interfaith Task Force on Darfur, will give a short presentation.
Read about Brousseau’s work and the “Lost Boys of Sudan” in this week’s Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO): ‘How Can I Pretend That You Do Not Exist,’by Elizabeth Kramer.
(The) Kentuckiana Interfaith Task Force on Darfur, (is) a coalition of local social service organizations, social activist and religious groups, and individuals.
Taskforce member Bob Brousseau says he started realizing the extent of the carnage about 18 months ago, after he began reading columns about it by New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof. “Something about it just clicked,” Brousseau says, “and I felt that I had to do something.”
Kallie provides this short list of web sites for those interested in learning more about Darfur:
Save Darfur
Divest Sudan (Divest Terror Initiative)
UN Refugee Agency
Mia Farrow’s web site: Humanitarian and Advocacy Information
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