Today I drove to Sacramento to have lunch with my parents to celebrate my mom's birthday. My sister was there, my kid brother of course has to be there. The restaurant is New Canton, where we usually go to when we eat out. It's good and cheap (important to my parents) and we usually order some seafood family dinner.

The food is quite good. Steamed rock cod, deep fried prawns, sweet and sour spare ribs (this is actually an addition for my brother who loves it), crab, muscles, squid. The last three being foods that I don't eat. Lots of rice and I eat a lot so at the end I'm quite full.

Now, since we were taking my mom out I wanted to pay. Unfortunately my parents are worried about my unpaid credit card bills (which I think I'm fully in control of) so my sister paid. Not something I want to fight about, although it's truly something I wanted to do.

Anyway, my fortune was something like "you believe in the goodness of humanity", which I actually do. I've probably said this before, but I think just everybody is good and decent, if given the chance. Lots of people make a mistake and then everybody treats them like a criminal, so of course they end up doing more bad things.

I saw this bumper sticker on the way back home: "Xenophilia", which is the opposite of xenophobia, which is somewhat like homophobia. Someone once said that it's strange that homophobes are so violent against homosexuals. Phobia is a fear, so you'd think that homophobes should be afraid of gay people.

It's not quite that simple. When you fear something your first reaction is to run away in some sense. Leave it alone, walk away, ignore it, run. But, what happens when you are continually confronted with this fear is that you get mad. You want to make it go away permanently, destroy it. I think I saw this in some nature show talking about monkeys, but people are quite similar.

Homophobia and xenophobia and probably a bunch of other phobias are all some sort of derivative of the fear of the unknown. We're taught, have it ingrained in our genes, see it in the world, that people who are not in your "group" are to be feared and distrusted. Not in your group means you can't guess at how they'll act so you have to be careful.

Kids are wonderful in that they're too young to have been taught to distrust others. I went to a public school and met a lot of great kids like myself. I never thought of them as white, black, hispanic, asian, or whatever. They were just other kids I saw at school.

Since then my views have changed somewhat, much to my regret. Now I meet someone outside my group and I have to fight myself to be open. At least I recognize it, but I don't know what happened to me. Maybe it's tv, maybe my parents, maybe my peers. I try to treat new people the same way, and if I fail, the fault is mine.

If we want to make the world a better place, we need to start with our children. The world won't change overnight, or even in one generation. If we're going to make a lasting change, we have to make sure the next generation is taught right and teaches their kids right.