Thanks for the mention, Haggai. Don't let up on the clueless ninnies!
I went to get pizza last night, and saw that they had felafel on the menu as well. I love falafel, so I ordered that, too. The woman behind the counter started chatting with me and my 10 year old daughter. She had never tried the felafel (it turned out to be excellent) and asked me where it came from (Middle East -- it's the one thing everyone there agrees on). They don't have felafel in Brazil, where she and her husband came from, so she asked if I was from the Middle East. We wound up all laughing about an Irish guy buying Arab food in an Italian restaurant from a Brazilian, and I told the bunch of them (the rest of the staff had joined in by then) about going to get my dry cleaning down the street and listening to the shop owner talking to her kids in Hungarian while the seamstress chatted with her husband in Vietnamese. All this in a smallish town (22,000 souls and one materialist).
Lessons learned:
1. I don't know if it will ever happen, but if humanity ever outgrows tribalism, it will happen in the USA first.
2. Americans are fat because we invented pizza.
