CAN WE GET A DO-OVER HERE?

Remember kid's games? There was stickball, tag, marbles, red-light-green-light-1-2-3, and all sorts of stuff made up on the spot, rules and all. Of course the rules were somewhat elastic and many a time a child was granted a "do-over," another chance to try to get it right. Looking around at today's world, it seems like a lot of grief could have been avoided by the granting of a do-over here and there. Let's start with Africa, for example. Is there a set of nations and governments anywhere on the planet more in need of a do-over?

Africa is one of the most bountiful places in the world, blessed with fertile farmland, rivers, timber, minerals, diamonds, oil, seaports, fish and farm animals aplenty and for the most part a temperate climate. In other words, a living recipe for a set of successful and productive countries. So what happened? Well, there was the colonialism of Western Europe, for one thing, hundreds of years of divide, conquer, enslave and exploit. That sure didn't help anybody but the privileged elite of the Colonial Powers. The colonial masters are gone but the divide part of their scheme remains, seeing once peaceful neighbors slaughtering one another earnestly as one military government after another fails miserably before being taken over by some other set of corrupt louts in uniform.

On top of the slaughtered innocents, millions starve on this bountiful continent. It would be at this point where one of the kids in this game would call "Do-Over!" And then the other kids would figure out that they're going about this whole thing the wrong way, fighting with one another for no reason when they could be having a fun game, no matter what tribe any of the players come from. The kids would then decide that the best players should be included in the game, regardless of the accident of their birth. If a kid shows he's a good sport, he plays. If he's a selfish jerk who only wants to keep all the marbles for himself, then he sits down and watches how it's done right. Simple.

Too bad the world of grownups isn't that simple. Oh, we still love our games and want them to be fair and square and we cry to the high heavens when somebody cheats, but unfortunately we leave out the fair-and-square part when it comes to running our nations. Even America, a nation founded on being fair-and-square and giving everybody a shot to play in the game, has struggled with our failures along the way to include everybody. The idea of America is always a work-in-progress and the truth is we've given ourselves lots of do-overs in the form of Supreme Court decisions, landmark legislation and growing social awareness.

The USA is now poised to give ourselves another huge do-over by electing a black man to be our president. For centuries a black man couldn't be elected to anything around here, except maybe to get promoted from field hand to "house nigger." Not that electing a black president will be a complete do-over for our minority citizens, but it's one hell of a sign of human progress in a world increasingly taking giant steps backwards in the understanding-your-brother department. Too bad we can't have a do-over of the past 8 years of squandering our place of respect in the world. Our next president, black, white or turquoise, will have his work cut out for him in that regard.

Maybe a do-over of the United Nations Charter would help. For an organization that's supposed to promote unity and brotherhood among the diverse peoples of Earth, they've done a lousy job. On their watch the world has fallen into tribal warfare and genocide on a scale not seen since Hitler's Holocaust. The U.N. has shown itself to be an organization of small men with small ideas, as corrupt and petty as any tin pot dictatorship around. In their 63 years of existence they've been a toothless giant overseeing one human-made disaster after another, rarely having the nerve to condemn criminal and murderous regimes. LIke America in recent years, they have squandered their moral authority. Without these two strong voices and examples of right and good, the world is killing each other. All one can say is; Do-Over!