By Clara Scherer
Translated By Fernando Uribe
January 18, 2008
Mexico – Excelsior – Original Article (Spanish)
For those who wonder about the impact on America’s image of the candidacies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, one need only read foreign press overage of the U.S. election. According to this op-ed article from Mexico’s Excelsior newspaper, ‘Today, two members of those ‘minorities’ aspire to lead the most powerful country, whose enormous influence is the fruit of a meticulously constructed capacity: A tolerance toward the other, the different, and the victims of that which has been called ‘inequality.’
The electoral competition in the United States shows the consequences of setting certain ideas in motion. How can we not exclude, discriminate or despise the other, the different, they who aren’t and don’t want to be like us? These are the minorities which put together, really are a majority. Those of different origins; women, young people and those of so-called senior-citizen age. Today, two members of those “minorities” aspire to lead the most powerful country, whose enormous influence is the fruit of a meticulously constructed capacity: A tolerance toward the other, the different, and the victims of that which has been called “inequality.”
The story is simple and requires few words. For humanity and in particular the USA, where there has been at least two hundred years of humiliation within an ocean of privilege, human beings have had to fight the phantoms of self-fulfilling prophecy. That is to say, prejudice. That condensation of popular “wisdom” which is expressed in so many sayings, and which are repeated every day and often. That “sentimental education” which says that it’s the suit that makes the man, that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and that women are just abject loose-canons, and so on.
This requires the breaking of old habits, engaging with entrenched sentiments and promoting reverse discrimination. In other words, affirmative action. How difficult it is. How important it is. How just. To rediscover everything contained in a word: Woman. Black. Native. Handicapped. Erase it. No, better yet, transform their meanings. Introduce affirmative inflections. Disrupt the scholars of language. Redefine the accuracy of syntax to avoid the suffering caused by odious inequality.
The Empire and the global economy (ie: the peace the development of all) in the hands of Obama and Hillary … This is what the women who met at Seneca Falls, New York, over a hundred years ago dreamed of . Their dream was the result of a conference in London to abolish slavery and promote the rights of Black people in the Western world [the International Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840]. It was at this same conference, in London, capital of the civilized world, that those same rights were denied to women. Who could have predicted what we are witnessing today? They dreamt the impossible and we are succeeding.
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