A nice thing to do is to start out your day by laying in bed and watching the last half an hour of a documentary about mass killings. That's just what I did this morning, to finish up Ghosts of Rwanda that I had started last night. It's a PBS Frontline show, and it doesn't go heavy-handed on the violence and gore. I really appreciated that at first but as the program went I, I think that they could have done a better job of conveying the enormity of just how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda -- many of them killed by hand by their neighbors. It was 800,000 total, over the course of 100 days. Hard to conceive of, but necessary, I think. They report the numbers in the film but tiptoe around the violence so much that it doesn't help you to understand the logistics of how that many people could be killed in that short of time.

That said, it's a story of (1) what can happen when good people take no constructive action to lessen a bad situation and (2) the enormous value in the bravery of just a few people, even if their actions come to largely naught.

In the first camp are the familiars -- Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Madeline Albright, the U.N. Security Council and so on. In the second, the unknowns. There's U.N. peacekeeper and Senegalese soldier Mbaye Diagne, who used a big toothy smile to shepherd hundreds of Tutsis past Interahamwe road blocks (until he was killed by shrapnel). There's U.S. embassy consular officer Laura Lane, who fought with her superiors for the chance to stay in Kigali and bear witness to the killings. And relief worker and missionary Carl Wilkens, the only American who stayed in Rwanda throughout the conflict who sassily asked the prime minister (and genocide architect) for help in saving an orphanage full of kids that was surrounded by genocidaires.

Five stars and highly recommended. Netflix it now.