Bewildering

Right now, the focus of the world is the Middle East and South-western Asia: Israel and the Palestinians, the Iranian elections, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pakistani bleedover, the Taliban using opium profit to encourage throwing acid on school girls in Afghanistan, the price of oil, and the effects of President Obama's Cairo speech.

Somalia managed to grab some modicum of interest with the pirate attacks and dramatic stand-offs earlier this spring. Darfur resurfaces regularly as a frustratingly forgotten cause, when some celebrity steps up to mention it during an acceptance speech or photo op. Even South Africa hit the BBC headlines recently with survey data showing strong indications of a culture of rape.

But those places seem so far away; another world, where we see the barren land, the desperation and hunger and pain and frustration through a television screen, and look away because we cannot figure out where to start.

There is another group, much closer to our modern Western lives, that still endures a type of persecution so blatant and aggressive that I have to confess I've watched it with a bewildering mix of confusion and fascination for years, now.

Here it is, 2009, and -- as RenegadeFuturist.com mentioned a few days ago -- the Roma are still topping the persecution list in Europe after a good seven or eight centuries.

It seems strange to me that we in the US hear so little about these attacks and profiling and discrimination that I have to rely on the BBC and Amnesty International to keep tabs on the problem. Is it that our media thinks we're already over-saturated with the world's various ethnic struggles? Or is it some archaic cultural holdover of the myth that gypsies and travelers are all untrustworthy outsiders, and therefore less deserving of our attention?

Because if there's anything the last few decades have taught us, it's that things always ends well when when we ignore the plight of the marginalized and dispossessed.

Last week's attacks in Belfast, Northern Ireland were only the most recent incident I've seen mentioned. (The unfortunate target families of that campaign have successfully been chased back to Romania, after the thugs even attacked the church that offered the families shelter after the attacks.) Last year, Italy bewildered the civilized world by declaring discrimination against Roma was acceptable because they're all thieves. (Again, the US seems to have largely missed all the outrage on this...) And this spring, a series of murders in Hungary have had the Roma communities on edge as unknown assailants assault members of their community.

The Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and other formerly Soviet-controlled Eastern European countries have been facing charges that their schools are segregated and that Roma children are deliberately sent to remedial schools designed to handle children with severe learning disabilities rather than being mainstreamed into the normal education system. Deliberately skimping on the education of these kids is only going to perpetuate the problem -- keep them poor and trapped in refugee camps and insular neighborhoods.

I don't have an answer to this, as infuriating as it is. I hope the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" and other European initiatives will actually accomplish what needs to be done, but that remains to be seen.