Achromatopsia

Opening Shot

Much of the Muslim world is a compressed cylinder of hate, waiting for any pinprick of offense to explode. A newspaper cartoon in Denmark -- can you get any more obscure than that? -- depicts the Prophet Muhammad, and his followers scream and shout and fire off their weapons in Gaza and hop up and down for the cameras from London to Cairo.

The first tendency is to damn them, as violent hypocrites, all too eager to tar the West as infidels, to hate and kill randomly, even their own. The initial reaction is: Who cares what they think? How can those so indifferent to the hurts they cause be so sensitive about perceived slights? They wave their bloody hands, irate over a cartoon.

I considered running my own cartoon of Muhammad -- a stick figure, with curly beard and turban. Invite readers to draw their own. We are still free, are we not? We are not France, where one craven newspaper that ran the cartoon fired its editor and groveled in apology. Always hot to surrender, the French.

But running a cartoon would be expressing a mockery I really don't feel -- the religion is fine, as far as religions go, it's what people do with it, a problem not unique to Islam. To print another cartoon, to poke a stick in the wound, would be descending to their level -- a phrase of my father's: "Don't descend to their level."

Good advice. Haters want to make haters of the people they hate, to justify their own hatred. But it's a dead end. The thing to do is neither reflexive belligerence nor Gallic surrender, but to take a step back and remind ourselves of the long view.

This is happening now because of globalization -- American technology and culture has connected the world, has marched across the globe, not through force, but because people like it -- they like Coca-Cola, they like rock 'n' roll. Women like getting rid of all those veils and driving cars. People like freedom to think, to speak, to do, what their hearts dictate, not what some grim imam on the corner insists they do.

Most people like it. But some do not. The zealots and the fanatics are outraged. They see that history, that progress is against them, that time is not on their side -- and it maddens them. Western culture will steamroll them, the way it has steamrolled the rest, without even trying. Not in a decade or even a century, but eventually. That is a certainty.

So they shout and threaten and scream and kill. While we must merely wait. Sadly, we are nowhere near the middle, or even the end of the bloody process, but only at the very beginning. They are on the losing side of history. We can't expect them to like it.

Free Money!

A guy was standing at the entrance of the Northbrook train station this week, handing out crisp new dollar bills.

"Gee thanks," I said, accepting mine -- it was paper-clipped to a flier advertising a bank's special (oh heck, reward creativity: Chicago Private Bank, 6 percent interest on a 12-month CD; not bad, really).

I went inside. As I handed over the dollar for my coffee -- easy come, easy go -- I realized I had to go back to the guy. No, not to try to get another dollar, though the thought did cross my mind. But there was something I just had to know.

Yes, he said, people did occasionally refuse to take the free cash.

Northbrook's Other Star

Glenbrook North High School boasts two rising stars. One, basketball phenom Jon Scheyer, has received plenty of press, and thousands -- myself included -- have made the trek to watch the spectacular guard work his roundball magic on the court, so we can say we saw him when he reaches the stardom that seems within his grasp.

The other, Sukrit Ranjan, an 18-year-old senior, hasn't received a peep of notice, even though his accomplishment is in some ways even more outstanding. There are hundreds of promising basketball players on their way to college, but only 40 teens in the nation are finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, a competition that pits the nation's brightest young minds for more than $530,000 in scholarships and prizes.

Ranjan -- I should probably point out that he lives across the street from me -- won his slot with a computer analysis of surface topography data from the

1996 Mars Global Surveyor, focusing on polar cloud formation (and your teen was so proud of his baking soda volcano).

He is one of three Illinois finalists -- the other two are Illinois Math and Science Academy students Letian Zhang of Chicago and Xin Wang of Geneva. Their entries "GLY Conjecture on Upper Estimate of Integral Points in Real Tetrahedra" and "A New Naturally Arising Mouse Model for Human Autosomal Recessive Achromatopsia 2" can probably be explained in words, but not by me.

Having three Illinois finalists is enough to tie the state for second place with mighty California (New York, for some unfathomable reason, leads the pack with 13 finalists).

Jim Oberweis and his close-the-borders haters should note that Ranjan was born in India, while the other two Illinois finalists were born in China. A reminder that, if one has to generalize about immigrants, the most accurate thing that could be said is that they work harder and achieve more, while native-born Americans seem satisfied with

Video Games and Coasting.

Anyway, good luck at the finals next month in Washington.

Closing shot

Can Super Bowl Sunday really be here? Already? I was hoping for a few more weeks of build-up and ballyhoo. I will be watching the game, unfortunately, because my boys insist. I don't know how we ever got into the habit of going over to my brother Sam's to watch the Super Bowl -- he invited me once, I guess -- but now it is a tradition on par with Thanksgiving at Bubbie's.

Even though sports seems to me to be the same thing happening over and over, I don't want to put it down, because I see how it gives continuity and meaning to so many people's lives. Like the cycling of the seasons, sports projects us through our years -- football melts into basketball which melts into baseball which leads us to football again.

But sports is like religion. Ya gotta believe. If you don't believe, it's a mere curiosity, a once-a-year duty performed for others. Put that way, it's almost enough to make a person want to be a fan.

Almost.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006
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