So, one other thing.
Today was Nagasaki day and as a result, the Hiroshima Day rally was held in the city. There were many, many young people wearing sweatshirts with “Lebanon” written on the back and waving Lebanese flags. I was very uncomfortable with a peace rally being turned into a patriotic exercise for a country that isn’t ours. This isn’t, to me, multicultural pride in heritage, it’s something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on.
Then I saw Global Haywire and it made all the connections again about how colonialism and the League of Nations dividing the world up after World War I led to Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland and how the Balfour Declaration after World War II led to Israel and how these are all the troublespots, how we are still dealing with the consequences and the fall-out of those decisions and yet we continue to impose dictatorial will in these regions – and we wonder why we end up with terror and children so despairing that being a suicide bomber just makes sense because the “next world” sounds so much better than this one.
I still want a global world, based on a carnival of difference, a celebration of the joy of the lovely languages I hear in Melbourne every day. I don’t want the melting pot – that’s a bad metaphor, because it renders everything liquid and undifferentiated. But nor do I want our cities filled with ghettoes and micro-communities of ethnic pride, acting out warfare based on allegiances to nation-states and cultures I don’t believe in.
We’re straight back to my Master’s thesis here. If I weren’t so insanely busy, I’d be doing a paper on it. As it is, there’s a poem fomenting.