Reasons

My sister texted me about a half hour ago (12:30am) and told me that she was watching Schindler's List. She went to D.C. last month and went to the Holocaust Museum. It's because of her visit that she's watching the movie right now. It is a hard movie to watch, just like Hotel Rwanda is terribly difficult to see. I doubt I could watch either movie again.
People that know me for more than 2 minutes know that I am more than interested in politics, history and public policy. Sometimes I think I play it off that I like politics because of the battle, some cockeyed civic competition. You wanna know why I am virtually addicted to politics? Because it is a way, a huge avenue to affect change, to help us all avoid the (horrific) mistakes of the past.
I don't know how many times I've heard that if we don't study the past we're bound to repeat it. I'm 28. Sometimes it feels like a long time, but mostly it seems like nothing. But in that mostly nothing, few quick years I have already seen things repeat.
My weapon isn't really politics, it's education. The more we educate people at least we have a fighting shot to make the world better. I know we (I) can't change people's desires, but truth can at least hold people to a higher standard. I met people on my mission who changed their lives because of truth. I met people who wouldn't change their lives in spite of the fact that they knew the truth. But they knew the truth and the standard was raised. Who knows, maybe later. But what gives me hope is the example of those who had the courage to change their lives because of undeniable truth.
My first semester teaching I had a student who already had some knowledge of Portuguese. She told me that she had just spent a month that summer in Mozambique in an orphanage, mostly with HIV/AIDS babies. She wanted to learn Portuguese so that the next summer she could speak to the children and tell them how much she loved them and cared for them. She taught us a song that they would sing about how happy they were and how grateful they were for how much they had. This same student was the same one that told me that I needed to see Hotel Rwanda. She said it would make me want to go to Africa and change the world. It did.
The truth exists independent of our willingness to believe it. But perhaps the most beautiful thing about truth is that it will change us at the profoundest level if we allow it.