One other point Don raises that does merit further discussion is the issue of hunger. Clearly, he is right in saying that malnutrition can affect child development and cognitive skills. Those are the facts. However, they are reversable conditions if living conditions are improved. And how do you improve living conditions unless you force governments and folks of means to share the wealth? That is the best argument I know for democracy and self-determination.

But poverty is not isolated to South America, or to any particular ethnic group. Poverty is a worldwide problem that I argue is a matter of socioeconomics and class. And just for the record, we have plenty of it in our own backyard, despite our often patronizing attitude toward Third World nations.

Poverty and lack of food are the primary reasons why malnutrition occurs in the United States. Ten percent of all members of low income households do not always have enough healthful food to eat, and malnutrition affects one in four elderly Americans. -- Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine

That's pretty frigtening, and an indication that the struggle is not limited to the so-called Third World. If the richest nation on earth allows malnutrition to occur among its own people, then clearly we have a distribution of wealth problem that needs addressing on a global scale.

Why are so many folks south of the border trying to get to the states, Don asks? Because they are simply following the trail of resource the robber barrons of capitalism have pilfered from their lands -- including the land itself in many cases.

So in staying with the facts, we can't deny that malnutrition is a condition that must be addressed to have a truly participatory society. But we have to take the race card out of the equation, and recognize it for what it is: oppression of the many by the few for the benefit of the few; it's a classic symptom of a class-based society that can only be remedied, in my view, by real democracy.

But to cast such a wide net, and assume that most or all of the indigenous peoples of the world are malnourished and therefore incapable of exercising democracy, is way over the top. They are very capable as a group of producing their own leaders (both formally educated or otherwise intelligent) and of winning back their rights through collective action.

If that were not the case, then the logical extension of the argument would be that African Americans (who endured centuries of malnutrition under slavery) would not be capable as a people of exercising democracy. That has always been the big lie. The truth is that you can't measure the human spirit in food groups. African Americans overcame slavery despite hunger, oppression and a lack of military might. They remain oppressed to this day in this country to be sure, but against all odds, they did beat slavery into the ground. And who would argue that as a community they have not advanced democracy for all of us in this country through their struggles over the years, including the Civil Rights movement?

And please don't argue that white men fought a civil war to free the slaves, because we all know that war was fought primarily due to economics, with African Americans being the "commodity" at issue. The only reason African Americans have lifted their plight in this country, and the only reason to this day, is because they are a resilient, creative, courageous people who have acted as a community, a participatory society, in the true sense in uniting against their oppressors. There are always exceptions, and corrupt leadership will exploit that to make it appear as though the exception is the norm, but they do so at their own peril in the long run:

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. -- Malcolm X

That kind of leadership scares closet racists and corrupt oligarchs, the "upity Black man," and I tell you the same thing scares them now when they look out over their "world conquests" and see other communities rising up and demanding to be fed, both with food and democracy.