America has always represented something wonderful to me when I was a child – the ideals that it has, the richness and the luxury.

When I got older and read about such things, it was kind of painful. ^_^; But America is a big country and sometimes in big countries, the right decision is difficult to make.

At a guess? They’ll probably write entire books about our amazing ability to beat ourselves up over our perceived sinfulness.

I deleted the three paragraphs that followed that observation: this is, after all, not a political blog. :)

It’s always odd to be a white man writing about racism, especially in such a charged atmosphere. Rereading this more than ten years after I wrote it, in the flameout of another war where Americans were and are persecuted by their fellow Americans on the basis of their skin color and ancestry ‘for security reasons,’ I find myself depressed all over again. And like Ronnie, we sometimes want absolution for our mistakes long after the fact, and find we can’t.

Last week, a woman on an American Airlines flight overheard several vaguely Arab looking gentlemen at the back of the plane speaking a foreign language. She became upset and demanded that the plane — then taxiing for takeoff — return to the gate and remove them. “I couldn’t stop thinking of 9/11,” she said.

The men were just back from a grueling round of training United States Marines in the desert. They are Americans. They love this country. They found the whole affair disgusting and demeaning.

The woman in question has indicated how badly she would like to apologize to them… but also says she would do the same thing again. After all, she has children. You can’t be too careful.

I wonder what sort of stories they’ll write about our American society in fifty years.