I wish I was sure about 95% of people anywhere being decent, unprejudiced and tolerant. I think if that was true the world wouldn't be in the state it is.

Or maybe it's the world being in the state it is that gets in the way of us being decent and unprejudiced and tolerant.

Anyway, people who preach hatred seem to have no difficulty in gathering a lot more than 5% of support in most places.

I think it's more a matter of most of us (al of us really) having a nasty side to our nature which is always liable to break out. So maybe 95% (or I'd guess rathr less) of each of us is decent - but that 5% of each of us (or I'd guess rather more) is there ready to be fanned into flame. Original Sin is one name for it.

But that's thread drift. As I read what InOBU has said, and it's reinforced by what Áine just said, the key thing is the way that a particular incident (not that different from what, I suspect, many of us have seen in the course of shopping - slapping kids is still part of mainstream culture in both our countries), has been projected into a media feeding frenzy in the States (which we have been spared here), and has brought into the light a lot of really nasty prejudice.

I don't think anyone has been suggesting that Americans are especially intolerant or anything like that. Just that when it comes down to it, the same intolerance that distorts the places your ancestors came from crossed over with them, and is still there, changed in some ways, unchanged in others.

"'Monster Mom' is Irish Traveller" - that's a headline from an Irish American online news site that I came across.

If there were news stories saying "Monster Mom is a Jew" I think most people would be a bit perturbed, and rightly so - even if it were actually true, and the label "Monster Mom" was actually a justifiable thing to call anyone in this kind of context. As Áine just said, it's right that there should be an effective response to an incident like this - but there seem to be some aspects of the way this whole thing has been handled which raise serious questions.

And thanks for that last bit Jerry - and of course I see you as a friend, and I know that you can be depended on to fight anything in the way of prejudice and discrimination that you came into contact with.