MINUS

In the breakroom at NCS there�s a bulletin board where people can put up ads and posters. Recently, and perhaps unfortunately, it�s also become a political sounding board. During the last project someone put up that ludicrous and patently false article about about how Ollie North, bless his heart, tried to warn us about Osama bin Laden in 1987. Today I went in and there was a printout of an email urging �Patriotic Americans� to boycott a US postage stamp commemorating the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fatr and Eid al-Adha because it celebrates terrorism (because as we are all well aware, all Muslims are terrorists).

What the fuck? A good quarter of the scoring staff are internationals, and some of them are Muslim. The rest of us tend to be fairly left-leaning. What the fuck was this anonymous person thinking? What service are they trying to perform? Are they lashing out because they know they�re part of a bigoted minority? It was a definitive end to the brief wave of idealism I was still riding from last night.

So I took the sheet down and went directly to the office of the human resources woman to ask her what the hell NCS is prepared to do about racist literature being posted in its facilities. But she was out for the day, so, frustrated, I wrote a message on the sheet and returned it to the bulletin board. What I wrote is hardly a stinging retort, but it�s the best I could do at the time: �This is grossly inaccurate and offensive to many people who work here. What were you thinking?� I could have gone on about all the atrocities that have been commited in the name of Christianity (the Crusades, the Holocaust, abortion clinic massacres, and hate crimes, to name a few), but I was too angry to put much thought into it.

Later in the day, someone else wrote: �Anwar al-Sadat was a Muslim who was killed because he wanted peace. Mohammed Ali was persecuted for protesting the war in Vietnam. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who have ever done anything disturbing at all.� I felt slightly more vindicated. But there are still hundreds of employees carrying on as if nothing has happened, and it�s not like the management is going to issue any kind of statement.

PLUS

I just went running in a light rain, listening to Music Has The Right To Children. I went as far south as I could before I hit Hwy 1, and discovered parts of this town I never knew I existed, streets with names like Howell, Friendly, Crescent, and Lukirk. And I discovered a new Favorite Place, the Summit St railroad bridge. That�s what I love about this town�I can run for ten minutes and end up in a mysterious place.

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