"Tooning out humanity"

There was salt in my heart today. I felt sad for a variety of reasons... some of them were personal, and some of them were about people and life in general. Sometimes the world seems so cruel and bizzare and horrible to me - people kill animals and plants and life on earth - people kill people, hurt each other, hate each other. The world seems disgusting sometimes. I wonder why people want to have kids when so much of life is pain and suffering. There are nice things in the world. But is it enough?

From salon:

----
Triggered by cartoons, the latest episode of the clash of civilizations is the caricature of a caricature, one in which our fundamental humanity is diminished, the almost limitless richness and diversity of that vast world of the intellect and the imagination that we call culture is flattened and shadowed over, the profound commonality of our human condition rubbed out, until finally all that remains is the horrible and the grotesque: the "liberal" West represented by a T-shirted female American soldier holding a prone and naked Arab on a leash, and the "devout" Arab/Muslim world represented by a masked and hooded terrorist holding a knife to a hostage's neck under a banner of "God is great."
----