The Words on a Page

I've always enjoyed books more than films.

I love that blank pages get filled with lots and lots of words.

What I love even more is that those words convey so much: drama, comedy, life, death, love, hate and everything in between.

And even more than that I love that I get to play a part in all of it. A great writer for me allows me to get caught up in their world. Maybe they envisaged their main character with red hair, but for me he has black. Maybe his colleague reminds me of a guy I once knew at school and so he takes on some of those quirky traits that my long lost friend had.

There are always extra dimensions in a book that each reader imagines in different ways.

There are no sounds or images in a book, just words on a page.

I like films but usually I'm not as moved as often as I am with a book.

So a really rare thing happened last night when I watched Shooting Dogs.

It's not a pretty film. It is based on one of our generation's most shameful events and our chosen inability to react to it: the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

And what's perhaps scarier than those events (and the failings of world governments and of the UN) is that we don't seem to learn anything from it.

I'm usually a believer in the good of humankind but then I'm confronted with something like this and I wonder.

What is wrong with us?