Non-Fiction: "Nation Building"

By Ryan Wilson

In the January of 1987 I traveled to the mountains of West Virginia with my junior high school Hi-Y (high school YMCA) group for a long weekend to participate in the Model United Nations. We were Brazil. I can't remember specifically why we chose to be Brazil. As I recall, being a larger nation carried with it certain privileges: you got a better seat in the General Assembly and therefore afforded yourself a better view of that year's crop of girls in their floral skirts and flats. I say "afforded" because the more a school was willing to pay the YMCA, the larger your nation. Superpowers don't come cheap.

My school Hi-Y club, all boys for purely sexist reasons, didn't care about its ascendancy.  Brazil was fine with us. We didn't have the resources or the ambition to be anything more than what we were, a group of friendly cut-ups who generally got along with the other delegates but tended to squabble amongst ourselves when the lights went out and a midnight prank went too far. Looking back, I am proud to have been Brazil, but I shudder to think of how poorly I represented those good pretend people. During most General Assembly sessions Brazil carried itself with a certain detachment over all the major issues it didn't readily understand, which is to say most of them. I'm sure the Cold War hung over our heads along with certain timely human rights violations, but we were too distracted to pay any attention; the all-girl delegation of France sat just one table over (incidentally, they did wear berets). I remember only one resolution and that was a no-brainer involving aid to hurricane victims. I remember thinking to myself, "Yes, Brazil should care about hurricane victims."

To my overwhelming annoyance I learned that Brazil was large and important enough to have earned a seat on the Security Council, which met in the late afternoons right when you'd like to take a nap. I forget how I specifically was pigeonholed into that windowless room with all of the most homely delegates at the conference, but when I look back at pictures of myself at the time, the waxed hair, the braces, I know I belong there. When Colin Powell made his now-infamous case to the real Security Council, I ignored him and took a good look at those surrounding delegates listening: all dogs, just like in my day. Indeed, it must say something about a world that wants to solve its most pressing problems by stuffing a room full of eyesores and, to add insult to injury, make them sit in a circle facing each other. It's a good thing too because all weekend long no one could say no to France, who wisely sent its dumpiest delegates to the Security Council.

All of our resolutions were ranked ahead of time by two twentysomethings just out of private colleges who ran the "ideological" portion of the program. They also ran the Security Council, which is where the most pressing resolutions were presented. Unlike us, these two were attractive. A man and a woman, they gave off the energy of a couple, but their energies seemed only halfway there. I now see these two very clearly as new age bohemians, ala fans of Michael Stipe (back when he was cool), who'd taken the job with all the right intentions but with the wrong impression of what the job actually entailed. You could just tell they'd rather be off hiking a mountain somewhere or making passionate love on top of all our mock-resolutions. But here they were, moderating the ugly, which is, face it, what any good Secretary-General like Kofi Annan must do. Like Annan, these two had wisdom but little power over us, and eventually they faded into our background.

By Saturday afternoon's General Assembly, Brazil had fallen into something of a diplomatic coma, which was only occasionally broken by notes passed under the table to Canada. Miraculously, they wanted to do business with us during the dance later that night. One girl even liked me, a fact that had been challenged all day by Spain. She danced with me that evening. As we danced, we talked about the uproar we'd witnessed that afternoon. Near the end of the long day, one nation had grown so animated over a resolution that shouting broke out on the assembly floor. It seemed one nation felt they were being given the shaft, and that nation was Iran.

Since I've already disclosed my ignorance regarding all official matters regarding my involvement in the United Nations, it's no use for me to try to recall what this was about. Historically speaking it might have had something to do with Iraq, or maybe someone like Syria or Jordan might have accused them of some misdeed. Perhaps another rival bad-mouthed their Ayatollah. Like much world history before the last five years, it doesn't seem to matter now. What I do remember is the delegate who became so impassioned and agitated. She had a name, it was on her resolution, but to me she will forever be known simply as "Iran."

~

Iran wore thick glasses and dressed like she was forty and already working at a downtown office. She was the type of child that's never really a child and is easily insulted when someone, usually an adult, reminds her of her age. When she stared at you, she held you briefly with a look of entitlement, so (if you're like me) you don't even want to return eye contact. Unlike the rest of us, Iran actually wanted to be at the Model United Nations. It seemed to bother her that we were only pretending.

By Saturday afternoon this girl had enemies, and while I wasn't one of them, I couldn't blame those who’d allied themselves against her. Whereas the General Assembly usually allowed time for debate after each resolution was read, Iran made a conscious effort to make herself heard, even when the resolution had nothing to do with her own country or geography. Looking back at her rising with criticism after nearly every bill was read, I realize that she was way ahead of everyone. Already she knew that she was part of a global economy. Everything touched her somehow. Of course, world politics run both ways. When her own bill registered on the assembly docket, it was personal and she took rejection personally. By the time the British and the Americans, who came from better schools, were done with her, she'd been censured. Unwilling to suffer a moment's oppression, Iran let out a war cry to symbolize the injustice of it all. I believe it was "You Fuckers!" She then walked back to her table and sobbed while the assembly voted against her resolution.

Iran didn't go to the dance later that night. Junior high school has its own sanctions that don't need to be written, debated, or voted into action. Before the dance, however, there was a banquet where the guest speaker, a former West Virginia Congressman, praises all of our "involvement." Before introducing him, the director of the Hi-Y program, a lanky man who we all agreed looked like the Celtic's Kevin McHale, paused a moment to reflect on why we gathered every winter to do this. He said it had something to do with learning civic values and bettering the world. He also said that there was no place in the program for outbursts like the one we'd heard that afternoon. Looking back, it was a mean point to make. Everyone in the room looked up from their rubber chickens and over to Iran, expecting and I believe hoping for a repeat performance from her. Instead she sat there and took it like the perfect ambassador.

All these years later, I might say it for her: "You Fucker!" But I don't feel any better, and I doubt she would either. There is no way no reconcile who we once were with the people we become. Even now I will recall some pre-United Nations meanness or some stupid action taken against a classmate, and I will shudder with the possibility that it is still within me. Or worse, I'll know that there are people out there who remember my past acts and will never separate me from them. Is this not the way we look at groups of people around the world? With time nation-states also mature for better or worse without ever shaking what they once were. We may "liberate" a people, or they may do it themselves, but can they entirely throw away their old selves? Will the world ever give them a new dance-card? You can never do seventh grade over again, and most of us can say with certainty that we'd never want to. You can only turn into something older, different, and hopefully better.

~

Iran did that. I didn't think I'd ever see her again, but years later I became one of those "ideological" program leaders in his early twenties for the YMCA. I was now charged with "leading" numerous strong-willed teens like Iran through the same program I'd slept through. Like my forerunners, I would have rather been making love on a mountain. I nearly did. I met a girl from West Virginia and attached myself to her interests, which eventually gave me interests all my own. Iran was her best friend.

I remember meeting her again one hot weekend in Washington D.C. My girlfriend was interning for a senator for the summer, and Iran was down for a visit. She'd turned into a woman, Iran had, but it was still unmistakably her: the dark hair, the thick glasses, the unstylish clothing. Only now she looked vaguely urban or "retro." But mainly it was her old confrontational gape that I recognized as I stepped out of my girlfriend's shower and saw Iran standing before me. It was like she wanted to begin discussing my "issues" before I even got dressed for the day. She didn't remember me. Why should she have? Still, she knew enough. My girlfriend and I were near the end, and Iran no doubt had been told all the wrong I'd done or said up to that point.

We spent the day awkwardly sightseeing. There was a festival on the Washington Mall, and in one tent there was a West Virginia contingent celebrating their Appalachian culture by singing union songs born in the coalmines. Here I saw the heart behind Iran's general ire. As we sat down and shared a fan, I heard her sing those songs she'd heard maybe all her life, and I even saw the tears in her eyes, welled by the people who needed those songs. Later my girlfriend told me about Iran's family history with the state and the labor movement. I felt regretful; after leaving the tent I'd said that I was anti-union. I wasn't. I just felt that I'd had enough of her. I wanted her to be Iran again and only Iran. After saying what I did, Iran is what I got.

More years pass, more time to reflect on what we do and to revise who we are. Iran, I'm told, became what she was always preparing herself to be, a lawyer. But unlike so many of her generation, she didn't go into the world of corporate law with its promises of personal reward. Instead she returned to Appalachia and worked for the people I heard her sing for on the Washington Mall. Perhaps more importantly, she married an artist (of all the types) and had a child of her own. Iran and motherhood do not coincide easily in my mind, but then I am hopefully far from the selfish Brazilian delegate and mean boyfriend I once was myself.

It is still never easy for me to reconcile who I am with what I did to become who I am, and I'm left thinking about how best to handle all the new Brazils and Irans of the world. Is it best to let them war about on their own, or do they need a model UN to help guide them through their eventual mistakes until they become what we'd want them to be? And after all that, would we even let them remain what we wanted? While our histories may never conquer our memories, they at least open windows to our constant nature.

For example, precisely one hundred years before Iran caused her scene, the first Hi-Y club began in 1889 in Dickinson, Kansas when D.F. Shirk, a science teacher at Chapman High School, caught three of his students smoking cigars at a general store. He took away their cigars and reportedly challenged them to do something better with their lives.