MONTREAL — Report of the membership committee of the Kodiak Esperanto Club: still just me.

On the bright side, that means we only need one new member to achieve a 100 percent increase. On the other hand, it also means we are now completely leaderless, since the three-year term limit prevents me from running for president again.

Meanwhile, as outgoing president, I am in Montreal to attend the seventh annual Pan-American Esperanto Congress with more than 200 other participants from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala and other countries.

Esperanto is a deliberately invented language — like Klingon, but without the costumes. A Polish eye doctor named Ludwig Zamenhof devised it in 1887 as an easy-to-learn second language everybody could use to promote universal understanding and world peace.

If you were around during the 1960s and not too high, you probably remember world peace. It was supposed to come about by levitating government buildings and not cutting your hair. As a child of the ’70s, the New Jersey of decades, I only know world peace as an answer in the interview portion of the Miss America pageant.

Everybody knows how its a shame humans don’t focus more on the feelings we all share as citizens of earth, like concern for the poor and hungry, worries about the ecosystem, or disdain for George W. Bush. Zamenhof figured people would get into fewer conflicts if they could at least communicate more easily.

A pessimist might point out that conflicts sometimes occur even between people who speak the same language, probably because they understand each other all too well. But Esperanto, which means hoping, is not about pessimism.

Esperanto as an international language is one of those obvious good ideas that would work fine if people put in a little effort now to save a lot of money and headache later, like universal health care or public transportation. Since we seem satisfied having our health care professionals spend most of their time filling out forms rather than treating patients, I decided to put some of my own windmill-tilting energy into this neutral world language. Kodiakans could make good use of it, as a quick bridge between English, Tagalog, Spanish and that gibberish kids text to each other on their cell phones.

Now, after only 121 years, our goal is in sight. At the current rate of expansion of the Esperanto movement, everybody in the world will speak it by the year 6011485, give or take a million, assuming zero population growth and the complete disappearance of Americans. Yanks don’t much take to talkin’ foreign.

So maybe we Esperantists are optimistic crackpots. The thing of it is, crackpots have a good track record when it comes to I-told-you-sos. As I have seen at this conference in Montreal, our invented language actually works. Esperantists have normal conversations, give lectures, write books and make friends with people from different countries.

Then there are the endorsements. Williiam Baden Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, recommended it. The Oomoto religious sect in Japan requires members to learn it, and the U.S. Army once used it as the language of the aggressors in war games. Hitler declared it a Jewish conspiracy, like democracy and a free press.

As it happens, Montreal is also the home of the prophet Raël, who in 1973 announced that space aliens created earth humans 22,000 years ago. Our extraterrestrial creators told him we have to adopt a common language for the whole world, but oddly, they did not name Esperanto specifically. They also told Raël that we should clone ourselves to achieve immortality, and we should never cut our hair because it functions as an antenna system for telepathy with the aliens.

And speaking of Klingons and Canada, the first full-length movie ever made in Esperanto starred Canadian actor William Shatner, before he became Capt. Kirk.

Maybe the world peace thing is a little overoptimistic, but if you learn Esperanto, maybe you too can win an Emmy for playing a senile corporate lawyer on TV.

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