On Tuesday, you read on this page an article entitled “Is God Listening?” Today, I would like to add this: “If you are listening, God, I hope you’re listening right now.”

In fact, I hope you’re reading this column.

Or is that too much to ask? After all, you are omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. My Christian upbringing taught me that you could do anything: you can create life, and you can destroy it. You can wage war, and you can make peace.

The Old Testament is replete with just such stories. From one page to the next, You’re continuously striking down someone, only to build up someone else — destroying one city, only to build another.

In the book of Jeremiah, for example, you use a potter as a metaphor (God uses really great metaphors) to teach Jeremiah that, just as a potter has complete control over the clay he works with, you have control over your creation.

So, conceding that you can, in fact, do all things, I have one thing to ask you: God, stop the genocide in Darfur.

I won’t presume to tell you how to do it. I won’t ask for any credit. I won’t ask for a sign. I won’t even expect fireworks or fanfare. All I’m asking for is for the first genocide of the 21st century to stop. I’m even willing to do whatever you want me to do.

What about you? Not God, you, the reader. What are you willing to do to bring an end to the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Darfur?

I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t already done. In fact, I’m just asking two things: Ask God — whoever that might be to you and in whatever way you choose to ask — to stop the genocide in Darfur. And call 800-224-2084 to let President George W. Bush know that you would like him to do everything within his power to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Some of you may think this is just another cheap shot I’m taking at the president. Some of you may even think I’m trying to blame the genocide in Darfur on him. It’s not, and I’m not.

Then why, you might ask, am I asking you to demand the president do what I’ve already asked God to do? Because I’m willing to accept that God might work through George W. Bush to get the job done.

God, as I said in my last column, and as we all know, works in mysterious ways. And if he’s willing to use the man that I take swings at like a sugar-addicted eight-year-old swinging at a piñata, then so be it.

So, for just once, I’m not going to comment on Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, nor on the skyrocketing price of gasoline, nor his failed policy in Iraq, because the truth is none of that matters compared to the quantum scope of murder being carried out on innocent men, women and children in the Darfur region of Sudan.

To date, over 400,000 non-Arab black Africans, both Muslim and Christian, have been systematically murdered. Villages have been burned. Women have been raped. Those who have survived the carnage, several million, have been driven from their homes and villages as far west as the Chad border, by Arab militiamen, the Janjaweed (meaning ‘evil on horseback’), who operate with savage impunity and the full knowledge of the Sudanese government.

While the Sudanese government denies involvement, and the Arab militias deny that genocide is taking place, the proof exists in the relentless and barbaric assaults still be perpetrated against the millions of Fur people now living in refugee camps on the Chad border.

As recently as Monday, President Bush proclaimed, “One of great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.”

Before anyone can live freely, he must first be free from violence, especially the systematic violence known as genocide.

In 1943, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, coined the term “genocide” in order to draw attention to what were, at that point, two state-sponsored genocidal campaigns to eradicate entire ethnic groups in the first part of the 20th century.

The first was the Turkish genocide of more than 1.5 million ethnic Armenians, murdered between 1915 and 1921; and the second, of course, was the extermination of over 6 million European Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, the slogan “never again,” which grew out of the Holocaust as a means to keep the memory of the Jewish genocide alive and to educate subsequent generations, has fallen on deaf ears.

Lamentably, “never again,” has become again and again and again and again.

Since the Holocaust, there have been 37 documented incidents of mass murder that meet the established criteria for genocide. Among them, genocides in Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, Guatemala, Bosnia, Rwanda and, now, in Darfur.

This is not about politics. This is not about Republicans versus Democrats. This is not about whom you voted for in 2004, or whom you plan to vote for in 2006 or 2008. There is more than enough blame, inaction and apathy to go around. This is about saving lives.

I won’t ask if you care. I have to believe that you do, because your humanity can only be defined by your ability — your obligation — to care. All I ask is that you call 800-224-2084 and tell the White House that you care. Tell President Bush to help stop the genocide. Tell your friends to call. Tell your parents to call. Tell whoever will listen to call. Tell them that “never again” must mean “never again.”

And, most importantly, tell God.

George Henson is a Spanish lecturer. He can be reached at [email protected].