Olympic sponsorship, China, and Darfur

SaveDarfur.org sends out emails asking people to send messages to political and corporate leaders, pressuring them to take this or that action toward helping Sudan. They give you pre-written messages you can use, or you can change them up and make them your own. The other day they issued a call to write Olympic corporate sponsors and ask them to put pressure on China, as China is in a very influential position with Sudan but currently isn't using their position to help stop the genocide. So I changed up SaveDarfur's message a little bit and sent my email off to coke, swatch, vw, and GE with one click of a button. I got a reply back from Coke today, a stock response that I later saw is an actual press release on their web site. I think it's pretty interesting, and I'll leave it at that. Coke's press release

Well, I guess I won't leave it at that. Maybe a few hundred thousand lives are worth a disruption in Olympic spirit this year. I understand what Coke is saying about the Olympics being a stronghold of unity in the world, and about the Olympic truce making it possible for nations of very 'disparate points of view' to come together even momentarily for something pretty spectacular ... but is there a limit? Would you take kindly to event hosts who had just sold weapons to the group of men who shot your entire family and burned their house down, but first gang raped your mom, your sister, and your daughter? I don't really want to declare a truce with those people. I'll pray for them, but I don't want to a truce with them. Support of genocide is not a 'disparate point of view.' That's like calling the Olympics a junior high track meet.

Now, I'm not saying people should boycott the Olympics or that these companies shouldn't support the Olympics. But I do take issue with a company who believes (or at least states) that pressure on China will not help Darfur, or who suggests that a private company is out of its place to act in any way that doesn't make the most financial sense. It of course would make financial sense for Coke to keep China happy and ruffle no feathers, gliding through the next few months on the highs of pride, competitive spirit, and unity that generally come with the games. But no company, or other entity, is out of place trying——trying, even if not effective——to stop human suffering, especially if the opportunity to do so is staring them right in the face. It's great to do X number of things to help, but if your capacity and moral obligation to help is X + 1 ...

It would be fair of Coke to read this and ask me, then, why I'm eating out for lunch and not donating that $ to relief groups, or why I'm not working for Doctors Without Borders or Oxfam. I don't pretend to have answers to that. I don't know where the line is, where 'X + 1' becomes finite and doesn't lead to X + 2 or X + 3 and so on. I guess we all have to live with making it finite where we choose to. For Darfur, or any other issue in which we're capable of helping.