Dear Gorgon,

Let’s not bicker. I think we agree. To be clear, I find the violent protests of radical Muslims against the Danish cartoon to be utterly stupid, immature, and hypocritical.

The violent protesters are mostly disgruntled young men with a chip on their shoulder who see the cartoons as yet another affront to their beliefs and their dignity. They are often uneducated and easily manipulated by hateful self-serving clerics and politicians who use them as pawns. I am definitely not condoning their behavior – just trying to understand it in its social and psychological framework.

Human beings are often irrational emotional creatures. Many things set us off our rockers.

Sacrilegious images of the Prophet Muhammad set off radical Muslims.

Losing a game unjustly sets of fanatic sports fans.

Bullying and feeling alienated sets off murderous teenagers (Columbine).

Results of criminal trials set off rioters in Los Angeles (the Rodney King trial),

Animal testing sets off militant animal rights activists (see lead story in Salon).

Globalization sets off militant anarchists (see news item about Turin and the Olympic Games).

SUVs set off militant environmental activists.

Abortion sets off Pro-life Christian clinic bombers.

The Iraq War sets off violent anti-war activists.

Gay marriage sets off rabid homophobes.

Paris Hilton sets off anyone with good taste!

What all these people (except the last group) have in common is a disrespect for civil discourse and for peaceful conflict resolution. They display an immature mindset in which perceived injustice can only be answered with violence.

Let us all fight the real enemies – ignorance, hot-headedness, arrogance, obscurantism, etc. - instead of painting one fifth of humanity (Muslims) as the bad guys.

I’m also in the target demographic (18-34) for these new trendy pop-culture focused newspapers, but like most of my friends, I stopped reading or subscribing to print papers a long time ago. I don’t like the wasteful nature and environmental impact of newspapers, find all the ads very annoying, and find the analysis to be tepid and meaningless.

To keep up with current events and culture, my go-to sources online include the BBC, The Christian Science Monitor (one of the most fair-minded and thoughtful journals around), SFgate.com (for local news in my home town San Francisco), Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Salon.com, CNN, The Nation, Village Voice, National Review, The New Republic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other international news sites. For science news, I check out Biospace, Scientific American, and other online journals. At work and in the car I often listen to NPR. This à-la-carte survey of news sources provides many different views of what’s going on around the world, different opinions, and different voices.

Of course, this takes a lot of time which most young people don’t have the patience for, but there is no real alternative for getting a breadth of views and forming opinions based on more than sound-bytes and partisan op-ed pieces.

When I travel abroad to Europe, the Middle East, or Asia, I’m amazed how informed about the world most young people are in comparison to most Americans of the same age. There’s definitely a culture of knowledge, discussion, and a hunger for the truth there that seems to be missing here. Sadly, most of us here would rather watch “Entertainment Tonight” than “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer” or read Vanity Fair rather than The Economist. I wonder how many of us here on Salon read Andrew Leonard’s fascinating “How the World Works” rather than “The Fix”? It would be interesting to see the number of hits sorted by demographic.