You may not find this, it already having slid to Page Two...

About ten years ago, through exceptionally strange circumstances, I found myself working in an engineering design office with an extraordinary mix of nationalities represented. Among them were: an Iranian, raised Shiite but thoroughly Americanized; a Lebanese who had come to the States for medical treatment for a wound he received fighting for Hezbollah; a Chinese who had been a university student during Mao's Cultural Revolution; a Hungarian refugee from the failed revolution of 1956; a large number of African-origin folks, not all of whom were American and one of which was part Cherokee. Then there was me, the token Anglo who had begin studying Judaism.

Needless to say, our conversations were quite often geopolitical. Israel invaded Lebanon while I worked there, and no punches were pulled in our resultant discussions, but no knees were jerked, either. Perhaps the difference was: none of us were 'cream of the crop'. We were a bunch of working stiffs with overlapping skills applied to a particular profession, with no axes to grind and no state-sponsored indoctrination to uphold.

Maybe that's the key to this war for the hearts and minds - bypassing the self-important minds and aiming for the hearts of the people of the heartlands.

E'