ARTICLE: “Colorblind: A new generation doesn’t blink an eye at interracial relationships,” by Sharon Jayson, USA Today, 8 February 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “West Coming to Grasp Wide Islamic Protests As Sign of Deep Gulf,” by Alan Cowell, New York Times, 8 February 2006, p. A9.

ARTICLE: “Contest for Cartoons Mocking the Holocaust Announced in Tehran,” by Nazila Fathi, New York Times, 8 February 2006, p. A9.

ARTICLE: Chechnya Expels Danish Aid Agency,” by staff, New York Times, 8 February 2006, p. A9.

I know a lot of people around the world and here as well like to view America as a country with very troubling racism, but in reality things are much cooler here than in the vast majority of the world. Our racial tensions don’t really hide much under the surface anymore, compared to when I was a kid growing up in the 1960s. Instead, they’re out and about and argued and debated so regularly here now, that we confuse that vigorous exchange with racism’s alleged persistence in our society.

The amazing and encouraging truth is that you can grow your way out of racism by simply raising a different sort of generation. Within about 15 to 20 years of effort, your forever-young society will strongly reflect that new outlook. We’ve done this sort of transformation on a number of fronts socially, such as drinking and driving, smoking, environmentalism, etc. It doesn’t take “generations” but just one well-raised generation to send a values shock wave through a society, especially one whose consumerism is so tied to youth trends as ours is.

I remain so optimistic about shrinking the Gap primarily because of that fundamental realization of how quickly a society can change, for good or ill (look at young kids the world over involved in violent conflicts, for example), that I first learned by watching Russian and East European societies change so rapidly once the Wall came down, and now watch even more rapidly unfold in China and India.

As for Europe and the cartoon wars, I think we need to be clear that this is not a “Western” problem per se, but a European one that is tied up primarily in the issues of immigration, demographics and the rapid aging going on there. Europe’s getting more and more caught up in the Big Bang we laid on the Muslim Middle East by toppling the Taliban and Saddam primarily because the tensions generated reveal some serious sociological, economic and political fault lines there.

Did the Big Bang create tensions that weren’t there? Absolutely not. Did it speed the killing/violence/crises? Absolutely yes. Is this bad or good for Europe? Just like for the Middle East, it’s a good thing. Holding on to the bad past is what gets you civil wars and race riots, two lessons we ourselves took a long time (roughly one century for each) to learn. America would have been so much better off so much earlier if some exogenous event or power had forced those issues.

So I guess all this really means is that America continues in its historic role as global meddler and revolutionary without peer. In contrast, our alleged near-peer competitor China hasn’t done diddly beyond its borders in decades, preferring a sort of commercial-only relationship with the outside world that our George Washington would have envied (truly, no “entangling alliances” to speak of, just crass commercialism).

Truly sad right now to watch the opportunists jump into the fray, like the Iranian hardliners or Putin’s puppet in Chechnya (oh yeah, we’re kicking out NGOs over cartoons all right!). Calls for cartoons to mock the Holocaust will only prove the point further: what can the Iranians do on this subject that Mel Brooks hasn’t already explored?

It’s the old joke about the American who says to the Soviet during the Cold War: “I can criticize my government openly on the Mall in Washington.” The Soviet answers, “Big deal, I can also criticize your government openly in Red Square in Moscow!”

The continuing and increasingly idiotic tit-for-tat here just makes Islam look more stupid by the minute. In the free world, you can mock any religion, but in the Islamic world, you can really only demonize non-Islamic faiths.

Feedback, as I always say, tells one more about the sender than the target. Islam increasingly feels victimized by history. Got it. Stipulate it. But so do the Europeans on this subject, because they built a free world of their own and they don’t plan on surrendering those freedoms to the stultifying sort of taboo-based culture that keeps so much of the Middle East disconnected from the larger world and the amazing economic growth it’s enjoyed in the last several decades. I don’t blame the Europeans for feeling scared on that score. If I lived there, I’d feel scared too.

Instead I live in America, with its warts and all, but likewise with racial tensions that cannot long remain suppressed among generations that increasingly grow beyond such self-imposed limitations.