The Darfur Letters Project

Ever wanted to scare someone? Well, I do now, only because I got scared. New York Times journalist Nick Kristof visited Tufts tonight and gave a lecture entitled "Raising a Moral Voice." One-third of his editorials in the Times have been about Darfur, which is pretty impressive, although the Boston Herald would claim that one-third of their content being on Britney Spears's bald head is far more impressive. Anyway, he told us about Darfur, and I was just stunned. I had to give the routine a break for an hour to let the thought of the horror sift through my head.

But the lecture was about doing something. I haven't done shit in regards to helping people who need help since the end of 2005, really. What made a lightbulb go off in my head during the lecture was his statement that if 100 people wrote each congressman, the whole disaster in Rwanda wouldn't have been allowed to happen for so long.

Let me present to you The Darfur Letters Project.

The title is unintentionally similar to "The Blair Witch Project." I needed a title for this thing and whoopee I've got a pop-culture allusion. But here's the idea, and even this is a little idealistic considering my sloth and my workload: I will send a letter to random people who I think are cool, like Mark Bellhorn, Donna Summer, and Samantha Mumba. It would go something like this:

"Hi! I've always been a fan of yours, but I've never really seen the need to write a letter to you. ....."

And then I would talk about Darfur and knock their socks off. The problem is that they probably won't be reading the letters. So part of the game would be choosing people who have lost fame such that they don't get letters from fans anymore, or something like that.

This makes no sense, since the whole point of mailing celebrities would be to get them to do something, and celebrities without fame are celebrities without power.

Whatever. Gotta do something.