It takes a lot to get a contemporary urban teenager or young adult up before dawn, but there are recorded instances of this phenomenon occurring, especially when the reason is a call to action to raise voices against the genocide in Darfur.
So on Sunday morning, in the full darkness, even before the clock had inched its way toward 5 on the Harkness Tower above them on High Street in the heart of the Yale campus, they began to arrive, many with dormitory pillows in hand. A contingent of 50, composed primarily of Yale undergraduates plus some staffers and members of the community, were on their way to join other activists at the Save Darfur rally five hours away in Washington D.C. Organized by the Yale chapter of STAND, Students Taking Action Now in Darfur, attendance at the rally would be the culmination of STAND’s year of work on campus and in New Haven. 
Chief coordinators of the trip, and of STAND’s successful efforts to have Yale University, the city of New Haven, and the State of Connecticut divest of investments in Sudan, were Lauren Jacobsen and Eric Bloom, shown here flanking Rabbi Lina Grazier-Zerbarini, of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. In addition to many other campus organizations, the Slifka Center provided critical support, such as the bags of bagels, cream cheese, cinnamon buns, and oranges for the trip south to the nation’s capital. “It takes a lot to get Yale students to commit to something,” said Bloom, a tall, quiet, yet go-to-guy from Wellesley, Massachusetts, “and the fact that we got 50 people to come testifies to how important the Darfur issue is in this community.” Rabbi Lina, as the students affectionately referred to her, underlined this: “To fill up a bus of with Yalies, to have them commit to a 15-hour trip, and to do this on what amounts to the last day of reading week in preparation for the exams, with the first tests early Monday morning is nothing short of remarkable,” she said. “It’s a real tribute to them, and especially to Lauren and Eric.”
As the bus cruised down an almost traffic-less Interstate 95 through New York and New Jersey, students such as Michelle Castaneda, a freshman from Westchester, and Amanda Elbogen, a junior from Brooklyn, who met for the first time on the bus, put their heads together to talk about the demonstration to come and what it meant. They, along with other students, such as junior Hugh Baran, from Paramus, New Jersey, and graduating senior Emily Jones, from New Canaan, dozed, studied, talked politics, took a cinnamon bun from Rabbi Lina, and dozed once again. Elbogen said a main reason she was on the bus is that she is the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors. “My grandparents somehow got through Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. I grew up hearing from them many things, but chief among them is that ‘no one helped.’ So when you see genocide recurring, in Darfur, it’s inconceivable to me not to speak up and to do this.” “Most Yale students,” said Castaneda, with a sweet, wry smile, “choose either to follow the path of Goldman Sachs or social justice. We choose not capitalism, but justice!” Several pals nearby, such as Baran and Jones cheered, and then dozed off. “Actually,” said Baran, “to me what’s most important about this rally is that it’s truly historic. This is the first time there has ever been a mass mobilization regarding genocide. This is huge for this kind of issue.” Jones agreed. “The fact that Bush may have done a little more than his predecessors is not a big achievement. I mean the problem isn’t fixed, and people are dying. I mean genocide is going on as we speak!” As the bus moved through Delaware, students began to use some of their time to study, and a tired reporter heard these academic buzzings: Castaneda: “I wrote 18 pages in two days so that I could come down to demonstrate.” Baran: “Yeah, it’s great that Yale divested from Sudan, but, hey, what about the Corrections Corporation of America? I mean the job isn’t exactly done.” Jones: “If the U.S. invades Iran .… .” Elbogen: “To say that Israel is the reason the U.S. invaded Iraq is totally dumb.” “Howard Zinn is really cool” Castaneda: “Who cares about the western canon? I took a course in the feminist canon last year, and I don’t think Aristotle is any more important than Simon de Beauvoir.” Arriving at the rally, the students took their signs, T shirts, and high spirits and joined them with those of, in this reporter’s estimation, approximately 25,000 others who eventually filled the mall in the area facing the Capitol and across from the spectacular new museum of the American Indian. In a rally that featured the rousing calls of dozens of speakers from Darfurians to Eli Wiesel and Brother Al Sharpton, from Ruth Messinger to Barak Obama and Nancy Pelosi, as well as a sea of fascinating and disturbing signs (Not on Our Watch, Bush’s Watch is Broken, Denial is Just Another River in Africa, Out of Iraq- Into Darfur, and, your reporter’s favorite, courtesy of Mohandas Gandhi: “Be the change that you want to see in the world”), everyone has both a collective as well as highly personal, often deeply emotional reaction, which can be surprising, and even disturbing. 
Leemore Medin and Evan Orenstein were wowed respectively by the handsome good looks of George Clooney’s activist dad Nick, and, in the case of Orenstein by an absence. “I wanted to hear more about the health situation in Darfur and Chad,” said Orenstein, a thoughtful, pre-med sophomore from Atlanta. “I mean that’s my interest, and maybe it’s something we can do, something practical and achievable while they take their time solving the big problem.” Your reporter, taking a water break on the beautiful but hot afternoon, sat on a bench and was immediately spoken to by a middle-aged woman who remembered being in this spot, 30 years ago, at a stop-the-Vietnam War rally. That rally, which occurred four days before the shootings at Kent State, had filled up the mall from where we sat all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial. The reflecting pool, she said, was filled up with protesters, some down to their shirts and skivvies, shouting, “If you’re not part of the pool, you’re part of the problem!” Where are those big crowds today, she asked? And your reporter, who had lightened his wallet of his draft card in a demonstration around that time, but in front of the Pentagon, and had similar memories, wondered the same thing. Everyone’s in agreement on genocide, she said, which was underlined in what we both thought was one of the most surprising comments, that of David Rubenstein, chief coordinator of the Save Darfur Coalition. He had met with President Bush the previous night. “The president spoke from the heart,” said Rubenstein. “He says he’s glad we’re here, but he needs us [reporter’s italics] to do more. He needs to hear our voice more.” Well, if we’re all in agreement, including the president, one wonders, what’s the rally for? There was, in this reporter’s estimation, precious little offered in terms of what rallying was going to yield. How would another 50,000 people press our president to influence the Chinese and the Russians to stand down from their oil-based support of the Sudanese government; don’t we crave the oil as much? Had this been the late 1960s, we would not have been satisfied by a report that the president is a nice guy; why was there not a representative from his office right there at the rally? If our speakers were all calling for a presidential-level envoy to be sent to Khartoum to indicate how important the issue was for us Americans, why should not the president begin by sending an envoy to us at the mall? It would take no jet fuel; he or she could just walk on over. Back on the train to the bus and home, STAND’s designated new coordinator for next year, Betny Townsend, a sophomore from San Francisco, and Eric Bloom were exhausted but comparing notes. They were both pleased with the energy of the rally. But more needed to be done, and Townsend tended especially to agree with the speakers’ push for greater need to “multiply ourselves.” “We’ve done a good job raising awareness on the campus,” she said to Bloom. “But next year, we need to get out into New Haven’s high schools. To send our STAND people there to talk to the kids, and then each kid has parents, and they will talk to the parents, and then the friends, and that way the circle will grow.” 
On the bus back, other students, such as Baran, while they were thrilled with the spirit and being part of it and the energy it conveyed, still he had some doubts. He had picked up some fissures in the comments of some speakers —” and he had noticed, for example, very few labor representatives and wondered if and how the coalition might reach out more effectively. However, he wanted to emphasize to an inquisitive reporter that such thoughts were but a footnote (he was surely thinking of papers and exams) to what was in his view an energizing, successful, and historic event. Your reporter also wondered at the absence of African-American organizations at the rally. While one of the most moving moments, at an early point in the rally, was the arrival of Africans, looking like a contingent of real Darfurians who had escaped, along with other Africans and members of African diplomatic contingents in Washington, there were by contrast few representatives of African-American groups compared, say, with Jewish organizations. Synagogues, Jewish centers, college organizations such as Hillel, and American Jewish World Service had sent busload after busload to the mall, there in gloriously T shirted profusion. And one of the rally’s most notable speakers, Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, single-handedly (with AJWS) has moved Darfur up on the moral agenda of America and especially the American Jewish community. So it made one call into question the hopeful characterization of one of the speakers, Rabbi Marc Schneir, of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, who called the rally day the rejuvenation of the great black-Jewish coalition that had wrought so much good in the civil rights days of the1960s. Baran, a student of history, and wiser in this regard than his years would indicate, commented that he wasn’t so sure that reputed coalition had ever been as strong as was advertised or described. Be that as it may, your reporter also had noted that Rabbi Lina, up in the front of the bus, had had , at the beginning of our journey, to explain to the driver, an African American, just what the Darfur situation was; he was very short on understanding. If this is anecdotal evidence, then the rejuvenation referred to by Schneier has a ways to go. Arriving back in New Haven close to midnight, the students were elated and tired. They felt good, as this reporter did, I believe, that they might tell their grandchildren where and how they spent their day on April 30, 2006. But that would be a long time in the future. Right now Baran was thinking about the morning, not that many hours off, when he had his French final to take.