When I saw the film Hotel Rwanda, the story of how Rwandan hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina saved 1,200 lives during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, one scene stuck out with more potency than the rest of the film. It was not the scene of the hundreds of innocent people lying butchered on a misty highway, nor was it the scene when the United Nations abandoned Paul and the people under his protection.

It was a simple conversation Paul had with a news cameraman. The cameraman had just disobeyed an order to stay safe in the hotel and had gone out into the streets of Kigali to film the genocide being perpetrated in the street. When he returns from the streets Paul sees his footage. “I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it,” he tells the cameraman. “It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.”

The cameraman replies bluntly: “I think if people see this footage, they’ll say ‘Oh, my God, that’s horrible.’ And then they’ll go on eating their dinners.”

On April 30, I stood with more than 10,000 at the Mall in Washington at the rally against the genocide now occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan. One of the speakers was Paul Rusesabagina himself. He stood at the podium and with a voice of pure conviction told us that he had been to Sudan and what he had seen was no different than what had occurred in Rwanda. I thought to myself: I am now standing with thousands of people who are refusing to go back to their dinners. I took pride in that feeling and the knowledge that there were people who shared my conviction. But as speaker after speaker reminded us, this was just a beginning. Just standing at the rally and shouting “Never again!” would not be enough.

Indeed, the news from Darfur that week has been grim. The UN’s food aid to the refugees has been slashed in half due to budget shortfalls. Those shortfalls could prove deadly to many of the millions of Darfurians who were forced from their homes and had to walk through many miles of desert to reach the relative safety of the refugee camps. And the failure of a peace process between the rebels and the Sudanese government only leaves room for the conflict to grow.

Those of us who went to the rally were hopeful that our voices would be heard by people throughout the country and the world and that we could convince the American public and those in power to do what they could to stop the genocide in its tracks.

So when I returned from Washington the day after the rally and scanned newspaper headlines, I was dumbfounded by the lack of coverage. The headlines were full of the looming illegal-immigrant strike and the rising price of oil. It occurred to me that our voices the previous day had not been loud enough; that the media at large believed that Americans were more concerned with work stoppages and filling their SUVs than they were about stopping a genocide that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, resulted in an uncountable number of acts of sexual assault, and left millions starving and homeless.

Though we came by the thousands to Washington shouting “not on our watch” and waving signs that read “Never again,” it, in and of itself, is not enough.

Enlisting powerful voices like Elie Wiesel, George Clooney, and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) into the cause is not enough.

Sending 700,000 postcards demanding an end to the genocide is not enough.

Those of us who went to the rally cannot simply congratulate ourselves for doing the right thing and go back to our dinners. We need to get more people involved. We need to flood the airwaves and make headlines. We can’t tell ourselves that we did our part until we can get thousands more people to stand up and tell the world that we will not stand by and let this happen.

We must keep yelling until someone listens and realizes the Washington rally wasn’t an anomaly, but the first rallying cry in a long struggle to wipe out genocide not just in Darfur, but everywhere that one group believes it has a right to murder others with impunity. There is no greater cause than to end the suffering of others. There is no more important issue facing us as a species than genocide. There is nothing more degrading to humanity as a species than the fact that we allow it to continue when we have the means to stop it. We cannot look away. We must not look away. Or the words “never again” will be nothing but words.

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