By SnifflesWe cats believe that there used to be a time — maybe when the Peace Corps was created? — when Americans were known for their friendliness and curiosity about other parts of the world. We had a certain amount of innocence, of course, but that was part of our charm.
However, we either must have been horribly mistaken, or we've turned into a nation of ignorant, hateful, xenophobic yahoos.
Or there's an entire cable "news" network devoted to feeding the paranoia of said yahoos.
Or both.
How embarrassing. We are scheduled to travel out of the country again this week, to another world capital — which, although narrowly ruled by Conservatives, seems somehow more civilized than ours these days. How will we explain, if asked, the screaming over the non-Ground-Zero non-mosque? Or the Americans who apparently now believe that our President with the controversial Christian minister is a Muslim?
Yes, we know it's the nuts on the fringe right who are feeding this insanity. But we also know that the media have been slow to call them out on their fringy-ness. But that's a HISS for another post.
Meanwhile, we were struck by a line from Nicholas Kristof's column this morning. "Today's crusaders against the Islamic community center [in New York]," he writes, "are promoting a... paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it."
"One day"? Heck, we cats are ashamed of it now.
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