Three things stand out about my experience at the UN Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa in late August.

First, I got there, to a gathering of people from throughout the world – "ordinary people," to use Cornell West's phrase – whose experience was, by and large, "on the wrong side of history."

Second, our country chose to walk out of this assembly, whose focus was the agenda of those who have suffered the effects of racism, colonialism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance. It was as if our nation said to the vast majority of the world's peoples that your experience is not worth our time, our listening or dialogue: "The world community's agenda is of concern to us only in so far as we control it."

Third, Durban and its agenda emerged from a staggering gap in wealth – which is known throughout the world. You see this gap in London and in Florence, Italy, places I visited recently. The same gap is seen in Durban itself, where the deep scars from the recent apartheid past are glaringly apparent in who controls the wealth, who does what jobs or no jobs, and the circumstances of communities and where people live. We see the same scars of history, the history of American slavery, in this community and too many of North Philadelphia's sister communities in this city and throughout the nation.

In spite of the walk out by the US and Israel, Europe did not walk out, thanks, I am told, to heavy negotiations that included South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.

The final governmental document included language recognizing the historic slave trade as a "crime against humanity." No matter what the media here might have said about a hijacked gathering, it was this issue that peoples of Africa and African descent were committed to, and it was this issue (and the related issue of reparations) that we as a nation were committed to avoid at all costs.

To the extent to which limited coverage allowed it to be known, all the work and hope of Durban – and Durban was filled with the hope of history's exploited peoples – was overshadowed by the attacks of Tuesday, September 11th. Literally, this horrendous trauma has cast a pall over us all, an ominous burden – because as with a first heart attack, we fear what might follow – added to the struggle for meaning and light in the darkness we all share.

Most of us in this land live lives of charmed insulation form the capricious threat of violence and the valley of death's shadow. I recall my own saucer wide-eyed amazement, looking up as I walked the streets of Old City Jerusalem to see an Israeli civilian, probably a resident in the Moslem quarter of the walled city, calmly carrying a Uzi sub-machine gun. As an adult from a land where soldiers and police until now were never seen so heavily armed, I was dumbfounded. But Palestinian kids of 5 and 6, busy with errands and childhood games, were absolutely unfazed.

Those Palestinian children remind me of North Philadelphia and its reaction to the insanity and slaughter of 9/11: It is God awful, but we live with violence and the threat of death for ourselves and our children day in and day out. A teenager who works with children and is part of a hip-hop project "Grands as Parents" was shot two nights ago. Thank God, he was not killed or critically wounded, but senselessly shot nonetheless. His aunt who raised him, shocked and rocked by fear though she is, has wrestled with vulnerability and death threats in faith. And filled with hope and faith she remains a source of comfort and guidance for him. The awful insanity of death and violence are realities with which this community has wrestled for decades, not weeks, and virtually never with headline coverage and minimal outside sympathy.

Of all people, the atheist – I suspect militantly atheist – Fidel Castro spoke a word of Good News to those on the wrong side of the world's wealth gap. He proposed a tax of 1 to 1.2% on all stock trading worldwide, which according to Castro's calculations would generate trillions of dollars a year. Since the present day wealth gap is a function of slavery and colonialism's exploitation of peoples and lands through out the world, such a tax should remain in place until the gap is closed. Somehow it is a poetically simple and concrete strategy to mend the gap in the world community.

In our capital campaign and ministry, we allow an opportunity now to mend the gap and concretely begin to build community among us all. Like the struggle against apartheid (work in which the Church of the Advocate was involved for the long haul), the struggle to close the world's wealth gap will be a long one. The Advocate's ministry and the campaign offer the opportunity to build community, without which we – all of us, not just "those people" – are doomed, both locally and globally.

The Rev. Isaac J. Miller is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He can be reached by email at RMill7@aol.com