As a child, I was often confused by different terms and words. Once, when I was very young, on a long distance trip with my family, I began to yell at my father that he should stop drinking and driving. He was drinking a Pepsi while driving the car.
As I grew up I realized words, and more importantly recognition of them, was an important facet of understanding and communication. When my mother tried to tell me something I did not want to hear I would simply proceed to plug my ears and scream, “I can’t hear you.”
Words don’t mean anything if I can’t hear them, right? I thought that I had uncovered the greatest intellectual tool of modern time. Unfortunately my mother did not see it that way and I would grudgingly have to mope to my task.
I have grown up from those wide-eyed simplistic ways to reach a more advanced state, but the world that created the words that I misunderstood and manipulated as a child does not seem to have any better a grasp of language or the true meaning of advancement.
Case in point: the United Nations Conference on Racism. A frame work by which all the nations of the world can come together and discuss the global problem of racism, face the shame of past disgrace and present injustice and build a road to the future.
But instead of having a captivating dialogue about the serious issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion in this day and age, the nations of the world have fallen back on their time honored and useless word games.
The United States left the conference without even an official delegation mainly due to a discussion on Zionism as racism, although the issue of slave reparations was concerning also. The problem that the US found was that those at the forum wanted to discuss conflicts in the Middle East and the actions Israel had taken toward Palestinians and other minority groups.
The conference was not set to admonish the Jewish community for anything; the conference simply wanted to have a discussion on the actions that led to and have been part of Israel. The conference made no pre-judgments on the validity of the argument. They simply wanted to talk about it.
The US simply backed out claiming that they would not stand for a discussion on this issue because they stand in defense of Israel’s action in the region as a way of defense from terrorist forces.
But in this realm, the US has simply laid out a semantics game. It is easy to call Palestinians terrorists and claim that the Palestinian Authority or other Middle Eastern nations are involved in state sponsored terrorism, but when Israeli forces attack Palestinian police stations, civilian cites, or government outposts that is considered military action.
This is a very touchy issue and I don’t claim to have the answers to the troubling questions of religious and cultural integrity in the Middle East, but no harm has ever come from discussing and acknowledging the problems.
The problem of language and ignorance is not a problem isolated to Americans - no matter what the French tell you - and the UN Conference has been pummeled on all sides by those who have verbal hang ups.
Those who had the courage to attend the Racism Conference are having some personal problems - the kind that Gold Bond just won’t clear up. They can’t agree on any language on a racism bill.
The first major stumbling block is over the phrase, "peoples and States." Should it be in brackets, without brackets or should it be nixed all together? No less then 25 nations made statements about these three words during one session.
At least these nations are talking, but what they’re talking about is as difficult to understand as Bernie Mack on cough syrup. And even without resolution, the talks are still two games ahead of the New York Mets.
Meanwhile the tragedy of racism continues to plague the world. As the conference winds on, girls in Northern Ireland attacked because of their religion, boys in Macedonia fight because of their ethnicity, and hundreds die because they were born into the wrong race.
I remember on the same faithful trip with my family pestering my dad with my silly questions, "how much longer till we get there? Are we there yet?" Complaining never got me any closer to where I wanted to be. We still had to sit and wait until we reached our destination.
So while the great language debate ala Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter "B" for Bigotry, the marginalized groups of the world continue to sit endlessly in a car of despair. They wait for their chance to have their misery mentioned in the holly lasting grail on racism. They wait for legislation that will have the power to move mountains and address the problems in nations that have turned a blind eye to systemic racism. They wait for an apology, for redress, and for someone to listen.
Reach John Parsi at theparsi@hotmail.com
