"... in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math...."

OK, I'm going to get a bit political here, but with some math! So if this is not something you care to read, skip this.

I've been accused many times of being an "elitist", as if giving someone a label like that is a sufficient argument against what I had presented (it isn't!). But you see, it is hard not to be an "elitist" when you read something like this.

Prominent Guido Menzio, who is Italian, was pulled out of a plane because his seatmate thought he was writing something suspicious while they waited for their plane to take off. She couldn't understand the letters and probably it was "Arabic" or something (what if it is?), and since Menzio looks suspiciously "foreign", she reported him to the crew.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

You can't make this up! But what hits home is what Menzio said later in the news article, and what the article writer ended with.

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

“What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia? It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base,” he wrote.

In this true parable of 2016 I see another worrisome lesson, albeit one also possibly relevant to Trump’s appeal: That in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math.

During this summer months, many of us travel to conferences all over the place. So, if you look remotely exotic, have a slightly darker skin, don't risk it by doing math on an airplane. That ignorant passenger sitting next to you just might rat on you! If by being an "elitist" means that I can recognize the difference between "math" and "arabic", then I'd rather be an elitist than someone who is proud of his/her aggressive ignorance.

How's that? Are you still with me?

Zz.