MERIDA, MEXICO (MPG) – They held a World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates last month in Mexico and a softball game broke out.

If the above phrasing sounds familiar, Rodney Dangerfield liked to joke, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” After attending what was billed as a forum to “address global issues with a view to encourage and support peace and human well-being in the world,” only to walk away disappointed, I knew that by borrowing from the late comedian, I’d have the perfect, albeit sad introductory line.

The batters of my metaphorical softball game were the Nobel Peace Prize winners whose three days in the Yucatan Peninsula included sit-downs with the press. The credentialed journalists were the pitchers, and by throwing mainly softball questions, the mostly Mexico-based contingent squandered the rare opportunity of asking tough and/or insightful questions to the distinguished do-gooders. In all, 30 Nobel Peace Prize laureates attended the event, representing themselves or winning organizations. The softball field, just to close out the sports-related figure of speech, was next to the working press room inside a world-class convention center in Merida, capital of the state of Yucatan.

Poor organization and logistics made covering the event a living hell, but of greater importance to you readers is how the Nobel Peace Prize winners responded to the questions that didn’t kowtow to the people of honor, few and far between as they were. Most journalists asked pandering softball questions like this one to Dr. Bernice King, the youngest child of revered Dr. Martin Luther King: “As a privileged white woman who can’t relate to the struggles of people of color, what can those like me do to help?” Knowing the organization, that eye-roller will probably get that woman a permanent invitation to all future World Summits. That would be a travesty with the white journalist already feeling so privileged and all.

Then a real question from the press was asked. My first of two called on MLK’s daughter to substantiate claims she made earlier at the World Summit about the leader of the Free World: “You have repeatedly called President Trump a racist. Can you give one example of something racist he has said or done?” King fumbled with her response, often looking to her handlers for help.

“Um, I mean there’s so much stuff that, um, that one can say,” King said. “He’s talked about sh*thole nations, the way he’s spoken about Mexicans – there’s a host of things I see that come across as if he does not like certain groups of people.”

So far I hadn’t heard a specific example of Trump being a racist, and as King continued with her response, she seemed to go further astray.

“Anyone who does not agree with him or stands up to him almost becomes enemy No. 1,” she said. “He just attacks, and it’s not always driven by race – it’s driven by Trump. That’s the bottom line. He’s a different kind of person than what you’d call your typical racist because … look at the way he spoke about Senator [John] McCain. Who does that? The army vet, the reporter, it’s on and on and on and on.”

King is a delightful woman who I had the pleasure of sitting next to on the plane to Mexico City. And what an honor and thrill it was when my offer of my blanket was warmly accepted when she felt a chill halfway there. All that aside, I would be remiss as a journalist if I didn’t say that my question didn’t continue to trip King up. She seemed to ramble and contradict herself.

“Out of his mouth I have heard him denounce white supremacy. I’ve heard that,” King said. “Whether or not he denounces it in a way that pushes away those who support him is another discussion. Those are the examples I have. It’s hard for somebody to believe he’s not racist. I can say that just because …. There are some things he’s done policy-wise that’s helped to uplift some of the black community. The First Step Act in terms of prison reform …. Racism is prejudice plus power. Racism is when you think an entire group of people is inferior to you or your peer group. I don’t know if anyone has examined that. Does President Trump feel that all blacks or Mexicans are inferior as a group? That’s a question we have to ask and determine.”

My second question for King, a quasi-lighthearted one, made the civil rights activist laugh out loud, which, all professionalism aside, was pretty cool. I asked, “When the family sits down for Christmas dinner, what’s the conversation like with Cousin Alveda at the table?” Alveda Celeste King, for those who don’t watch Fox News, is a civil rights activist, former Georgia congresswoman and a vocal supporter of the President. The 68-year-old niece of MLK has defended Trump on many occasions, including on national TV when she said, “Racism is just a word that’s being bandied and thrown about and thrown at the president, in my opinion, unjustly. President Trump is not a racist.”

After a good laugh over a question her PR person said had never been asked before, Bernice King gave a thorough, thoughtful response:

“Because our family has such strong unconditional love for each other we do not let those kinds of things tear us apart as a family,” she said. “We have strong, vehement disagreements about how President Trump conducts himself. She is a Christian and she is also a minister, but at the end of the day she does what she does. I say what I need to say, she says what she needs to say.”

King then spoke much like the minister she is and her father was: “One thing I’ve learned about different opinions and ideologies is if you sit down and listen long enough and shut down your right to be right and allow yourself to hear what a person is saying, you might discover a bit of truth. That’s how my father developed his philosophy of non-violence. He was able to read and study a lot of different philosophers and theologians. Even those he didn’t agree with. So, if we’re going to create a more humane world, we have to learn to do that. Alveda has taught me because she’s so strong in what she feels and believes. We had a discussion over Labor Day weekend, and I sat and really listened to some of the things she was saying, and as I thought about them holistically there was some truth in that, and I had to acknowledge that. We have a tendency with people we disagree with to disagree with them fully. If there’s something specifically that I don’t like that is a part of your ideological system I shut you all the way down. I discount that there may be something in your makeup that is very beautiful, very powerful and has truth to it. But we don’t allow ourselves to open up to people unless they think mostly like us. And if we continue to do that then we’re going to have friction and tension and conflict.”

Attending his ninth World Summit was Frederik Willem de Klerk, former president of South Africa and a 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner with Nelson Mandela for their role in ending Apartheid. The political prisoner he freed and would later succeed him as the country’s leader. De Klerk’s response to a question on migration was refreshing in that he was the only laureate to say that nations cannot open the floodgates for immigrants.

“Migration is not only a problem between the USA and Mexico,” de Klerk said. “Look at the hundreds of thousands of people crossing Africa into Europe to escape from dangerous situations, from hunger and joblessness, and the problems the European countries have in assimilating these migrants. Migration is a problem around the world and it’s going to become a bigger problem. In the case of Europe, the population is shrinking, and just to keep the economy at the level where it is they will have to take in migrants. But I have sympathy for any country that says, ‘We can’t take anybody who wants to come into the country. We have to have an immigration policy that also puts importance on the interests of our country. We need migrants with specific skills.’ So, immigration policy should strike a balance between humaneness and protecting the interests of the country.”

Participating in her sixth World Summit was Rigoberta Menchu Tum, a Guatemalan Indian who was awarded the Peace Prize in 1992 for her work championing rights of indigenous peoples and reconciliation between ethnic groups. The morning of her so-called press conference, during which she and her guest panelists gobbled up all but the last few minutes for questions, Tum was on a different panel on migration. She believes that no one flees their country unless they’re desperate, and their sole objective is to live where they are safe. Assuming that’s true, I asked Tum why the caravans originating in Honduras and El Salvador make the long and dangerous journey to the United States instead of seeking asylum in the first safe country they reach, which so happens to be her homeland of Guatemala? “How open are the arms of your country, or is your nation happy when the refugees continue on to Mexico to ultimately be handled by the USA?” Her response, through an interpreter, was so off the mark, I may as well have asked if she likes meatloaf on Tuesdays. Even her panelist friend told me she completely dodged the question. Clearly, Tum is riding the Peace Prize train without practicing what she preaches. Hypocrisy reared its ugly head several times during her abbreviated Q&A; at the start she urged the media to ask tough questions.

A fixture at these near-annual events is Lech Walesa, who won the Peace Prize in 1983 for founding Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement that played a key role in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. My question for the former Polish president, a pro-capitalist, was whether he would have been more successful developing his country as “The America of the East,” as he declared in 1991, with a businessman in the White House, Trump, than an actor-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan. Walesa said that it probably wouldn’t have mattered who was the U.S. president at the time because the collapse of communism throughout Europe happened faster than anyone predicted.

“My strategy was Poland first, but then East and West Germany reunified and there was a snowball effect in other countries of the [Eastern] Bloc,” Walesa said. “The speed actually surprised President Reagan and myself, too.”

Asked about Trump’s chances to win a Peace Prize this December, the Polish activist danced the polka around the question, responding through an interpreter that while the world leader diagnoses situations in a correct way, the solutions he applies are wrong.

“He wants to move in a different direction than the whole world is heading,” said the man who won his Nobel Prize by doing just that. Walesa used Trump’s policy on protecting the nation’s southern border with Mexico as an example. “He says there are too many people coming into the United States. There should not be a wall, but money invested in Mexico to create jobs. And once this is done, this will level the disproportion between the countries.”

Trump’s mistake, Walesa said, is “forgetting that people behave like interconnected containers of water.” He elaborated. “There is a great disproportion in development in the world. It’s not Mexico’s fault of this disproportion. It’s the United States’ fault. We need to move the water from one container to another. We need to level the disproportion.”

Walesa didn’t sound like he’d put money on Trump winning a Peace Prize this year or any year. Despite efforts to keep the peace, namely making historic inroads with North Korea and in the Middle East, all without war breaking out, Trump seems to be on the same prizeless path as some past Republican presidents. Reagan engineered the end of the Cold War, and Richard Nixon, by normalizing relations between the U.S. and China, forced the Soviet Union to yield to pressure for detente with the United States.

The last GOP president to win the Peace Prize was Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Since then, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have been so honored in addition to Vice President Al Gore – all Democrats. This from an organization that as late as last month’s World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates said the selection committee has no political bias.