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JP:

Your perception that the trend is by no means an emergent one is accurate. It's been evident for years, but recent events like the ones you mention suggest that it's getting worse. Consider recent racist graffiti incidents at various memorials in Europe. Before one dismisses such actions as the skinhead fringe, consider the repeated remarks of French politician Jean Marie Le Pen, who has remarked that the gas chambers were a "minor detail" of the second world war. The fact that Le Pen was prosecuted under a French statute prohibiting such remarks does little to reassure one either about the state of racial tolerance or civil liberties.

Your comment about drunks in NYC resonates with me, as I can confirm that homelessness and intoxication are prevalent, and will probably get worse now that the weather is warming up. Despite my sympathy for these failed dot-com investment bankers I do agree they are a problem, but by no means indiciative of a broader decline.

To those of you Europeans and Canadians whose response to the allegation of racial intolerance in Europe is to hit back with sharp statements about our own history of institutionalized racism, I offer only the following. First, thanks for participating in the discussion, and I mean that sincerely, because I think it's important that you get a sense of our view on the issues without the filter of mainstream media either here or there.

Second, remember that ours is a country that was founded on the very ideas of liberation from the bondage of tyranny. Those are heady words, but it's true: our revolution was the product of the joint efforts of political philosophers and guerrilla soldiers, who drew from the history of political struggle in Europe to fashion a new government that was designed to be immune from the corruption and abuse of power that so characterized Europe to that point. They looked at things like the Magna Charta, the Restoration Settlement of 1689, the Chartist movement, the history of the English Reformation and subsequent struggle for re-Catholiczation, when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. All of which were designed to not only prevent the encroachment of government into our lives, but designed to protect the fledgling government from collapse.

But as they say on TV, wait, there's more. As our own government teetered on the verge of collapse from within for a few years, we watched as all of Europe was conquered by a French dictator, who started on the Italian coast in 1796 and a few years later had humiliated the military powers-that-be and proclaimed himself Emperor. We once again withstood an effort to retake North America in 1812-1814, but we rode that out also, and meanwhile the French dictator made the mistake of taking on the Russians, leading to his downfall (whew!)

Enter the abolitionist movement in Britain. We had our own, also, and after having withstood attempts at recolonization, attempted to put an end to the practice of Slavery. Aided little by the Confederacy's trade with European powers, we proclaimed the emancipation of African Americans in 1862, and endured a four year Civil War that was a thinly disguised constitutional struggle, not about Papist sypathies this time, but about the fundamental issue of States' rights to perpetuate slavery in the face of a Federal mandate otherwise.

The point of all this history lesson is that we deserve a little, no, a great deal of credit for advancing the conception of human rights on this planet. You might think about that when you are discussing our intervention in Iraq with your neighbors, and the subsequent domino effect of democratic movements popping up in the middle east. Then again, if you believe the media, NONE of these things had anything to do with the policies of Mr. Bush, which theory was extruded from the same vat of nonsense that claimed that Mr. Reagan's policies had nothing to do with the fall of Communism.

But I started talking about New York City. In a few minutes I'm going to walk out my office door, into the most racially, economically, and culturally diverse place on the planet. Enemies since biblical times walk down the street together, and trade with one another. Immigrants, and I'm not talking about European immigrants, are right now arriving here by the thousands LEGALLY, thousands more illegally (sorry, I'm not falling for the PC "undocumented" title so long as it's against the law) and taking a slice of the American pie. That means that they are participating in the economic and civil benefits that being here provides: the right to be free of the political tyranny of their place of birth, and the right to participate economically DESPITE their origins.

NOWHERE on earth but New York does that happen. So give us a break. We aren't perfect, by no means. But more people are getting more opportunity to break from a painful past and find new opportunities here than at any point in the scope of human history. And that's a net positive, any way you look at it.

Oh, and the point about the Minute Men? It is nothing short of ABSURD for our government to simultaneously encroach on our civil liberties in the name of protection from terrorists while ignoring the gigantic sieve that is our southern border. If Mr. Bush wants to liberalize legal immigration policies from Mexico, let him set up a tarheta verde stand at the border and hand them out. But to ignore illegal crossings because you think that lack of enforcement constitutes an immigration policy is a slap in the face to every airline traveler who's gotten a pat-down from the TSA.