About your former friends. Every time I drive past an elementary school playground, I look at the black and white and brown and yellow kids playing and enjoying life and it always plays in my mind that in five years or less, they'll all retreat to their own corners and forget that they ever knew each other. What a world.

A guy I used to work with once told me how upset he was when he took his children to see his in-laws in a suburb that is known for high housing prices. One day, a Nigerian neighbor knocked on the in-laws' door and politely requested that they not allow their children to play with his. He had heard so many negative things about American black people that he thought his kids were too good to play with them. Curiously, Somalis and Ethiopians don't seem to hold this attitude.