Leaving South Africa now, with just four teams left, I’ve been thinking about our incorrigible thirst for the worst. Those who stayed away out of fear missed an uplifting event, and not just the German bit.  The stadiums got finished, the airports, the roads, things worked on the whole. Violence took a breather. South Africans came together, leaving the question that Mohale Ralebitso, a banker, put to me this way: “Can we inhabit this space of unity rather than just visit it?”  I don’t know. I do know the naysayers overlooked something invisible, race-blind South African spirit. I also know we’re much better at covering conflict than community, and borders than their banishment on Facebook.  Could it be that we’re just stuck covering the world in conventional ways, gazing at formal frameworks (like states) that are as obsolete as my old Olivetti? Networks outstrip nations that are left playing catch-up, like those long-haired Argentines chasing trim German shadows. Networks are hopeful. They’re where the coming generations live and love.  Americans are the most creative inventors of those networks and the most stubborn in resisting their nation-dissolving impact. Therein lies a good measure of the world’s tensions.  I ran into Bassel Nasser here, a Lebanese Shiite, born in Sierra Leone, a diamond merchant, heir to a long tradition of Arab traders across Africa, whose best friends are the Jews of the New York and Antwerp diamond exchanges (“It’s much easier for me with Israelis than Europeans, we have the same tastes”), and whose worst experiences have come in Sunni Arab countries where the Shiites are the butt of every insult. His business partner has put aside diamonds for now to invest in the Lebanese property boom.  Nasser, whose world is not the one you see on maps or read about in headlines, went to Soweto’s Soccer City stadium draped in a Lebanese flag and ran into Israelis with an Israeli flag and someone took a photograph of them enveloped in the two flags. “Do you think there will be peace?” Nasser asked me.  On the evidence, no, the Middle East will insist change is impossible, the Andy Roddick of global regions, unable to alter its game. But then again, in South Africa, you just can’t say reconciliation over history’s wounds is impossible.  I think the main difference lies in attitudes to victimhood. Blacks here never succumbed to the victim’s paralyzing, backward-looking culture, the corrosive coin of the Middle Eastern realm.  Blacks lost a war, lived to fight another day, resisted and prevailed. “It’s when you perceive yourself as a victim that you become most capable of hatred, and the great majority here do not see themselves that way,” Moeletsi Mbeki, a businessman, told me.  Sure, as Nelson Mandela observed, “There is no shortcut to the country of our dreams.” South Africa’s halfway house has its full share of anguish. But it took the first, hardest step and has not deviated. That’s the one Israelis and Palestinians refuse to take.  For South Africa’s last game, I drove out across the “platteland” (flat land), the high plateau of the Orange Free State, where apartheid was harshest in the “dorps,” or small towns, of Afrikanerdom. Near Excelsior, a few hundred flimsy-looking huts formed a shanty at the roadside. Hundreds of blacks had emerged. They were dancing. They were smiling. They were waving. They were joyous. They had absolutely no reason to be. Or so the statistics of their lives would tell us.  This is the first magical World Cup.  What’s the difference between war and peace? One day.  Oh, yes, Germany the Friedensmacht, or peace power, to win.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 6, 2010, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe
When you spend a lot of time in conflict zones, where people nurture grievance, you become a sucker for change.