Good points on natural vs unnatural. People get all excited about "organic". I do it too. I don't use use chemicles on my garden. I buy organic vegetables at the store when I can find them. But then "organic" gets used on things like bug killing poisens. Organic chemicals are the bad ones - the ones your body is likely to end up with cancer because of. But it's "Organic".

I thought about the us & them thing last night too, but I couldn't articulate it. Some of it is pretty primative stuff. And from sheep keeping, I tend to think of primative as where the good survival traits come from. And in some sense all the things Bradley mentioned - gay, black, female -- comes down to identifiable as different, and potentially weaker.

I do wonder what can be done about it all. It should be *not ok* for any of the things Bradley talked about to happen. I am daily wondering what I can do to change things, especially from my position as a white, thirty-something, mundane looking mom. It bothers me even when I see folks hitchhiking along the freeway, and don't stop for them, because it woudlnt' be tough for someone to overpower me, or with a kid in the car, have a good deal of leverage over me. But I wish the world I'm living in wasn't a place where I had to think about those things.