Obama won the election because he went around the country meeting all kinds of people and seeing that they were people who were usually doing their best by their own lights. He met George Bush and has said that he found him to be an okay person, even if he fundamentally disagrees with him politically. He's not the devil, just somebody with a very different outlook from you. Obama has transcended the kind of nastiness that characterizes this article, the general run of Salon reader responses, and other specimens of Salon journalism, such as Stephanie Zacharek criticizing the movie 'W' for not being nasty enough. You people need to take a leaf out of your hero's book i.e. grow up. God does not take sides, and if he's there at all he works in much more mysterious ways than simply influencing the outcome of elections. People are at their most dangerous when they're in the right. George Bush proved that, and why should you be any different. The reason I have high hopes for Obama is because he's not like Bush and not like you.

Fair point, I suppose. I guess I feel that there should have been some official consequences attending on what she did, and there weren't.

Republicans aren't the only ones who incontinently jump on anything that seems to substantiate their paranoia about the opposition. In the Duke Lacrosse case when the person making up the story was a black woman and her 'attackers' white men the left was all over it before they knew anything about the details, and since it was proven false, have been totally unapologetic about their behavior. The woman in question has been given a degree by NCCU. The corruption is not just in the McCain-Palin Campaign, but in the fact that everybody in this country is busy helping to constitute their own identity by being on a hair trigger to find racism and sexism and prejudice against them everywhere they look. You do it yourself, Joan. A recent example was when you jumped to the conclusion that McCain's 'that one' remark was racist. The woman who did this surely deserves as much compassion as the Duke Lacrosse woman, but she won't get it. Activist compassion is politically motivated more often than not, in my opinion, and most of you would need years of psychotherapy to find out what you're really angry about. I say this as someone who fervently wants Obama to win, because I think he's done a reasonably good job of being fair to everyone, even if his motivations are also purely political, though I don't necessarily think they are.

How is comparing the black experience to the Irish one a minimizing of black people's pain? The Irish may have become 'white,' in America now, but their history is as tragic and painful as anyone's. They know all about the kind of self pity that stops people from taking responsibility for themselves. How typical of Americans not to know anything about the rest of the world. I hear black people say that 'white people don't know they're white', meaning, I take it, that they don't feel marked by their race in the same way as black people. But Americans, of any color, don't know they're American. Most of the behaviors that people condemn as racist and as the property of one identity or another, are merely human.

I have a different but somewhat similar situation. There are places I want to go that I don't go because of the presence of someone who hurt me badly, who has no remorse for what they did, and who will hurt me again if given the opportunity. I've lived with my anger about this for a very long time. The anger hasn't disappeared, but it has become easier to live with since I accepted that it's a no-win situation. If I avoid them completely I lose a community that is important to me. If I assert my membership of that community by showing up to events where they are also present, I have to live with the discomfort of being around them, of trying to avoid eye contact, of the internal battle not to engage with them and try to make them feel bad for what they did to me. I can't win. This is the world I live in now.

I don't know for sure what I'd do in your situation, but I think that since it's a one off event, I would go to it. I don't know if you're likely to get the kind of closure that Cary hopes for for you, but you never know what it might trigger. If you don't go I suspect nothing will happen except that you'll feel angry about not being able to go. If you go and it's awful, well, you tried something and it didn't work out that well, but it's over now and you live far away from those people. Either alternative hurts. You can't win. Deal with it.

And maybe buy yourself some flowers.

What Lobelia said. I try not to be a self righteous vegetarian, because I'm not perfect, but there's no excuse, in my opinion, for eating meat in rich societies like ours. The innocent suffering of animals who have no words to express their pain is the most terrible fact I know about the world. It disturbs me more than the suffering of men and women, which I can sometimes make a kind of sense of because it is never completely innocent.

I don't see how the phrase implies that. It implies that there is a usual order for racism in this country, not a natural one, though I agree that it's a misleading phrase if it implies that racism is more usually practiced by one particular group.

all you have to refute my 'rant' with is personal insults. You're the problem, not the solution.