Editor:

In February the African American community will be celebrating Black History Month. In four years, the world will be celebrating the end of the twentieth century and that of the second millennium.

The millennium has been excellent for some people and very bad for others. Africa lost 10 million of his sons and daughters to slavery, the Native Americans lost most of their lands and white people were persecuted in Europe for political, economic and religious reasons. This millennium has shown one more time how a human being can be very cruel toward a fellow human being. Africans maintained other Africans in slavery, Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Arabs kept other Arabs in slavery and Asians enslaved other Asians.

Our second millennium has been full of contradictions. In America the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not abolish slavery. The vast majority of the African American people are still the victims of an intellectual terrorism. They do not have the freedom to express themselves differently from the mainstream African American elite. Africa is very rich but mentally poor. The African people are under a modern form of slavery that I would like to call a mental slavery. White people are killing each other in Bosnia and in Chechnya. In Asia, over one billion people are still suffering from a communist rule.

The world is crazy, the millennium has been crazy and we are crazy but we don't seem to understand it. Out tragedy is to have crazy people in charge of our mental health. Our only consolation is to think that we are ... normal.

Seydou Coulibaly
range management Ph.D. candidate