What are some conflicts around the world that we should be hearing more about?
Immediately after 9-11, many Americans swore that they’d finally start paying attention to world affairs. Books with titles like Militant Islam: What Happened While You Devoted All Of Your Mental Energy To Clinton’s Penis, O.J., Condit and the Sharks, started selling by the bucket load as we decided that understanding the world was crucial to our national security. Two years and two wars later though, we’ve pretty much quit our soul searching and have gone right back to navel gazing. For example, how often do you hear about Hamid Karzai in the news compared to how much you hear about Scott Peterson? We’re once again ignoring an international issue that matters to us, in this case the fate of Afghanistan, to obsess over what’s essentially a National Enquirer story. Hello, Sept. 10! The continent we seem to ignore the most is Africa. Below is a primer on some of Africa’s major crises — all of which we hear too little about, but that we might one day wish we paid more attention to. Sorry
