AT THE SUMMIT IN SOUTH AFRICA, DAY 3

You sit in the press room at the Sandton Conference Center surrounded by gaggle of fellow journalists, eyes glued to computer screens in the basement of the building. You are surrounded by official and unofficial documents, invitations to press conferences. Your colleagues are sending off emails around the world. It is hard to know how many of the issues that animate this conference will get into the press — the development reports and the dissents to the development reports, the position papers and manifestos. This is a conference about who lives and who eats. It is about food and water and work.

And yet those concerns can get lost in the babble of drafts and documents and the like. There seems to be so much to do and so little time to think. The NGOS are feeling pushed out by the UN and their South African hosts as the language of sustainability is co-opted by governments, institutions like the World Bank, and corporations. To them it has a simple subtext: take from the greedy and give to the needy. Close the gaps in the world. Make globalization work for all. To the officials, it is a more complex process of managing change, institutionalizing programs, administering programs with ten year time tables that never seem to get realized.

Am I covering the summit or is it covering me with all of its detritus and the pressures to get around and see as much as I can.

The paranoia on the part of the government is clear. Under the one UN Media desk is a sign advising UN people to call the police when journalists inquire about protests. The government people fear, as one high up told me, protesters who will get “naughty.” They worry about the war veterans of Zimbabwe next door who are said to be coming. All of this could embarrass Thabo Mbeki–who after all enjoys 66% support.

A prominent journalist here thinks that this conference may help unify and congeal an opposition in South Africa itself that, up until now, has been fragmented and marginalized. The presence of so many activists from abroad is galvanizing it.

As the UN blathers away, activists are publishing newspapers like GLOBAL FIRE, that deals with the “burning issues facing humanity.” This paper represents civil society but is militant, offering a critique of globalization and lashes into the South African government for doing the bidding of the big corporations.

The rhetoric is heating up.

What is sad is that there seems to be little communication between these different worlds, that in many ways mirror the problems they have come to discuss.

As I write, I remember where I was on this day in l963–at the March on Washington for jobs and justice–listening to Martin Luther King enunciate his dream. I seem to still be enrolled in some endless, ongoing and as yet unrealized movement for change. This struggle continues. It hasn’t fully changed the world; it hasn’t left it the same either.

I can only write in short bursts these days, but hope to be back with more. You can reach me at dissector@mediachannel.org