I must be racking up enough updates here to compensate for staticness for the rest of the year. But things just beg to be expressed, shared, sent as a plea for sanity—even if I'm going to laugh at my melodrama a few days from now. I don't much care.

The accumulating evidence against Bin Ladin and his associates has morphed into all-out racism. A mailing list that I'm subscribed to included this statement yesterday:

"We need to leverage everything we have in our allies, our economic strength, and our military might and destroy them; their people, their government, their economy, their religion, their spirit. Only when we have done so will the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans truly have been avenged. If war is on the horizon, then so be it.... Damn every last one of them to hell."

And today, a friend IMed me from NYU: "5 kids just got shot" Doing what? "being Indian." That's not even the same race or religion as Bin Ladin, but I guess the fact that they share skin color is enough.

Hasn't enough horror happened? Why do Americans have to turn and inflict more wounds upon ourselves?

It's even more sickening and fantastic that this racism is manifesting itself in New York City, the ostensible "melting pot" of America. So much for that metaphor. It's more of a haphazardly tossed salad: most of the lettuce still sits bulkily on the bottom, the tomatoes drip down the edge of the bowl, the moist and grated cheese remains clumped together as if afraid to separate, to mingle, to merge.