Take Any Culture And Fill In The Blanks!

Some evening it’s been. I had to get down on all fours and reach far beneath my bed to retrieve the small book, well, booklet actually, well…actually a sheet…oh alright, a card - an old business card, which had become lodged between a couple of dust balls and an errant tic tac that rolled under the bed one morning. It was my ‘George Bush Presidential Report Card’ that I made at the beginning of his first term. I was going to use it to mark my reminders of things he had done which pleased me. (and not necessarily anyone else.) I more or less discarded the card when the pressure began to convince the world that Iraq was the root of all the world’s problems.

I want to make note of his decision not to bow to the senate or congress over the management contract of some American ports by a group based in the UAE. Well done you President Bush!

You were able to see beyond all the hyperbole and hysteria your administration created at the beginning of your term, that instilled paranoia in small town America that anything Arab is bad. Unfortunately, there never seemed to be a differentiation made, or at least sufficiently, between a bunch of despotic religious zealots who used a twisted view of their religion as their platform for terrorism and an entire culture.

I hope you continue on this path of re-education. But I suspect it will be difficult. If we look at all the people who have suffered in Northern Ireland over Christian religious differences we have grim reminders of how long it takes to eradicate the deliberate planting of an ill seed.

I doubt many remember, or even know of the period when a grim phalanx of FBI agents rounded up anyone in America of Japanese or German descent; women, children, and babies, and carted them off to holding camps in the mountains of Virginia and California-merely because of their heritage and accents. Lurking in every corner, the Japanese became the flavour of the moment, where America was whipped into a frenzy and tacitly encouraged to perceive them as the personification of evil itself - brainwashed into running amok at the drop of a hat.

Here we are, half a century on and there still exists a prejudice against them – a seed planted by a child’s parents and continued on through modelling parental behaviour. Dr. Martin Luther King spent his entire life trying to eradicate a similar seed.

I sincerely hope President Bush stands strong on this matter. I have no doubt the UAE contractor will do just as good a job as P&O have done. If there needs to be a review of security measures, and by all accounts there does, then so be it. But please, please do not judge people simply because of their birthplace, colour of their skin, accent, or religion.

We’ve been down this path before.