By Lewis Finfer

The world says "never again" but then it's "genocide again," this time in Darfur in the country of Sudan in Africa.

The recently-released film "Hotel Rwanda" awakens people now to how the world was silent to the genocide that killed 800,000 Rwandans in 1994. We watch the movie and shake our heads at how could this have been allowed to happen.

But haven't we been through this before? The 1970s geneocide in Cambodia and then the film "The Killing Fields." The genocide in Bosnia and then the film "Sarajevo." Crank up the film for the one on Darfur and we'll shake our heads about that a few years from now.

But, meanwhile back at President Bush's Texas ranch, he is allowing genocide to happen in Darfur. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is willing to call it genocide while others quibble about whether 70,000 dead and more to come fulfills the meaning. However, while the Bush Administration can send some humanitarian aid, it won't send any troops or really help other countries to send them. Never again but genocide again.

Obviously, I don't get it. I have the privilege to know Ernest Rugwizanoga from working together in Boston. In 1994, he hid in the attic of a school for three months to survive the Rwandan genocide just like Anne Frank hid in an attic from the Nazis during World War II in Amsterdam. Meanwhile many in his family were killed. He was taken in by St. Mark's Parish as a refugee and given housing in their rectory for several years during which he became a youth organizer with Boston Youth Organizing Project.

In 1972, I joined a thousand others who sat down in front of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston to protest the war in Vietnam. I was arrested then for this non-violent, civil disobedience protest. It's time for me to sit down in front of the O'Neill Federal Building.

I have a modest proposal about the genocide in Darfur. People should gather every two weeks at the federal buildings in their cities and sit down in civil disobedience and get arrested to draw attention to the genocide in Darfur and the need for President Bush to act.

Wouldn't some of the the many of us who write checks to human rights and humanitarian groups like Amnesty International, Oxfam, Unicef, Doctors Without Borders, Concern Worldwide, Grassroots International, Physicians for Social Responsibility, etc. be willing to sit in front of the federal building once or twice?

In Washington, maybe some congressmen and various political and entertainment celebrities would do this, too, so the media would cover this more. Can the media and rest of us ask President Bush, every day, why do you say "never again" about genocide, but let it happen again in Darfur? Be impolite, ask every day.

I really don't know if he'll listen. He probably won't. But don't we have to try or do we need to wait a few years, go see the documentary movie made on Darfur, and then shake our heads?

David Rieff is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and Failure of the West. With the bitterest sarcasm, he says, "never again" might best be defined as "Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940's." Samantha Power, who wrote the history of world inaction on genocide in A Problem from Hell, says that the writer Arthur Koestler called those who spoke out against Nazi atrocities, the "screamers." I feel like screaming a little and hope that others can find ways to scream and act about Darfur and other terrible injustices, too.

Lewis Finfer is the director of the Dorchester-based Organizing and Leadership Training Center.