Amy Torregrossa is a Roger Williams University sophomore alarmed by the horrors in the Darfur region of Sudan. The day I met her, she wore a T-shirt that said, “INSTEAD OF MOURNING A GENOCIDE, STOP ONE.”

She is one of several college students I have encountered at the capitol as they and General Treasurer Frank Caprio seek passage of a bill to divest state pension funds from companies doing business with Sudan.

Torregrossa, who is from New Hampshire, told me that since she learned about Darfur in 2005, she has been unable to turn her back to the violence sponsored by the Sudanese government that has killed or displaced millions. But, of course, plenty of people do ignore it. How is that? “People don’t think that it impacts them, and that it’s Africa and it’s ‘supposed’ to happen there — you know, ‘They’re tribes, it has nothing to do with the United States.’ ”

It certainly impacts Torregrossa. “Knowing that people are dying and they have no protection — I’m a human being. It makes me sick to think that that’s going on and no one’s helping.”

Most students I’ve met are from Brown. They include Eliza Sweren-Becker, a sophomore from New York. She told me, “I don’t think we have the privilege to stand idly by and allow lives to be wasted and taken.”

Phil Burns, a sophomore from California, said, “I’m a very religious Christian and I was looking for something that was a real moral issue that I feel very strongly about.”

Ben Rome, a freshman from Vermont, said he’d homed in on Darfur as a member of a youth group, Young Judaea, a national Jewish organization. It troubles him to see the world pay so little attention to Darfur. “We’ve looked at the Holocaust, we’ve looked at Rwanda, we’ve looked at Bosnia, and we can’t make a connection? Somehow we just keep letting it go.”

The most visible student is Scott Warren, a sophomore whose dad works for the U.S. State Department in Zimbabwe.

Testifying before the House Finance Committee, Warren urged legislators to embrace the divestment bill and send a message: “We will not allow genocide to occur on our watch, and we will not allow it to occur on our dime.”

Incidentally, Warren once dispatched an e-mail to me at 3:07 a.m. He says he’s often up at that hour trying to juggle his academic work and his Darfur activities.

The divestment bill is sponsored by two Providence Democrats, Rep. Joseph Almeida of South Providence/Washington Park and Sen. Rhoda Perry of the East Side.

Taxes, schools — you name it, lawmakers have plenty of topics to deal with. So why does Almeida include Darfur in his portfolio of issues? “It’s just something that needed to be done,” he tells me. “I’m not a hero. I just know that it’s wrong. I want to fix it.”

Perry, whose district includes Brown, says students prompted her to pay attention to Darfur, and why shouldn’t the legislature spend a little time on something so important? She says of her well-off constituents, “They want me to be involved in helping the social causes in this state. They want the state and the state’s government to take care of those who are in need.”

And if you want to think, “Oh sure, Rhoda Perry, she’s just a bleeding heart,” be her guest. Says Perry, “I’m proud to be a bleeding heart. I’m glad there are some bleeding hearts up here.”

I say: Liberals, conservatives, pols, students — whomever it takes, whatever it takes. When it comes to Darfur, anything is better than indifference.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com