Johnny Delaney, a fifteen year old Irish Traveller was killed in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, May of 2003. Those who killed him called him "Gypo"... and oddly enough, rather than being seen as a racial murder, they were found guilty of manslaughter, receiving only a few years for killing him. It seems the judge, as with many on this board, are not greatly offended by this last great prejudice.

This is not only the case in England, in the Czech Republic the average sentence for killing a "Gypsy" is measured in months ... as in the case of the skin heads who threw a young Romany mother off a bridge into a swift river, drowning her ... the judge ruled it was the river which killed her, not those who threw her in...

Look at the photos last month in Italy, of Italian sunbathers ignoring the corpses of two young Romany children who drowned in the surf, and were left for hours on the beach like dogs...

After so many hundreds of years I don't know why I expect more. I may still believe the world is growing up, growing out of prejudice and hatred ... because as long as we rule one person out of the contract of human expectation, no one of us is safe ... even the most self confident bigot in the mainstream may someday find that they are ruled out of the contract by illness or happenstance...

I don't know ... it seems we are too old for this, we poor silly humanity.