Once upon a time, in conversation with an old high school friend, one phrase utterly scrambled my memory of grades 9 and 10: "You were so popular," she recalled wistfully.

Back then there was no easy shorthand for my bogglement, but we have it now: WTF??

Popular – huh. Not in my reality. Short, fat, loud, hyper-sensitive and four-eyed, I layered new dimensions on the concept of awkwardness. My disdain for anything approaching group-think battled moment by moment, tear by tear, with my crying desire to be lovable and admired. My natural gifts – intelligence, artistic curiosity, an insatiable drive to consume the written word - were not the fashionable ones of athleticism and easy sociability. My humor was peculiar, my tastes out of the norm. Finding my tribe in glam-rock, for example, puzzled the hell out of Midwestern kids lined up for Foghat or BTO tickets. They shunned Bowie, Mercury, Sweet – "those queers".

I couldn't adopt their preferences, any more than I could stop wishing they would like me.

In retrospect, mine was a riddle few so young could solve with grace: I craved the acceptance more conventional tastes and behaviors could bring, even as those tastes galled me.

I never have figured out how my social rank registered so differently in my perception and that of my friend. But I think of it now as I scan the headlines and see story after story tinged with fear and pain of that we've all felt: otherness.

So many events in the collision of our political and personal worlds carry at their hearts the consequence of alienation. Look at just these few:

• It's been a week now since the appalling attack on New York cabbie Ahmed Sharif – the first weeks of many he'll be laid up. But as late as yesterday, the cash raised to aid his family as he heals "barely covers the cost of baby formula" for his child.

Dare I posit that, had blond-haired, blue-eyed cabbie Bill Smith been sliced open by a brown or black man uttering a Muslim greeting, his bills and his family's would be close to covered in mere hours? Ahmed Sharif plies his trade to raise his family in New York City. But he's not really American enough, regardless of the taxes he pays. His skin is wrong, his God is alien, his accent marks him as worrisome. Fear makes "real" Americans (as Sarah Palin would have it) grip their wallets a little bit tighter.

• Think what you will of Glenn Beck and his following. Nonetheless, some 87,000 of them gathered on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's landmark DC address, to broadcast their anger (fear?) and demands to "take their country back". Pick any picture, and scan the sea of faces for anyone who isn't white. Parse the language, ears open for Christian rhetoric despite lip service to the contrary.

The "are they or aren't they racist" conversations will never end. (For the record, I believe they are; my question is how honestly they themselves connect the rise of a minority-race president to their cresting anger.) But if this were in fact an organic, honest demand for change – for a return to a prosperous, employed America where the individual is treasured - the numbers tell us this crowd would be, horror of horrors, a multi-cultural one. 

It is instead the puppetry of the moneyed manipulating the fear of The Other for increased political and monetary power. Sound paranoid? If you haven't, you need to read Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker. If you have – you need to work to spread the word. 

• The ongoing battle over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" has a new wrinkle: a planned "9/11 Christian Center" which promises to paint that religious persuasion in its most flattering light:

Pastor Bill Keller of Florida said today he will begin preaching
Sunday at the Marriott at 85 West Street (see proximity to ground zero here).
A weekly service is planned at the hotel until the $8 million 9/11
Christian Center finds a permanent space. (Fundraising is going well,
Keller told Salon today.)

To get a sense of where Keller is coming from, consider his project's website,
which calls Islam a religion of "hate and death" whose adherents will
go to hell. It also says: "Islam is a wonderful religion... for
PEDOPHILES!"

Keller is the same pastor who hosted a birther infomercial that encouraged viewers to send him and a partner donations to advance the birther cause. His Internet ministry explicitly calls President Obama the new Hitler. He calls homosexuality a perversion. And in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called "voting for Satan."

But as Justin Elliot notes in the article, and as Jason Linkins underlines, this overtly hateful group's plan has generated none of the hue and cry the Cordoba community center has. In the US, Christianity - manifested as the quiet, personal quest to live like Christ, or as a judgmental hatefest targeting nothing less than the US government - is Us. "Muslim" is Them - the Other.

Prove this to yourself: ask ten people what they think of New York City's proposed Muslim community center. Then ask them their thoughts on the Christian Reconstructionist movement. Ironically, their own city council or school board is a likely target of the one they know less about.

• Between 17 and 20 million Pakistanis have been uprooted, injured, killed, or left penniless by floods. We're inured to huge figures, hearing them daily with regard to US debt, the homeless, war tolls around the world – so stop a moment to really feel this one. Up to twenty ... MILLION ... individual human beings. Yet donations have lagged far behind any comparable disaster internationally.

Granted, causes of the disparity are many, not all of them based in the feelings of one group of people toward another. The BBC offers a good analysis on this.  But indeed, perceptions of the relative value of these particular human lives play out in the picture. Who we're willing to help is in no small part determined by how easily we can see ourselves in that person's shoes. And Pakistanis are Other.

For this last, I ask you to consider the new verb form, "Othering" (™me): the act of painting another as outside the pale; the drawing of a glaring Us/Them delineator. It's a skill the practitioners can quickly turn upon each other.

• Ann Coulter, who's made a lucrative practice of Othering "fags"  and "faggots", has been out-Othered by a master Otherer. In return, she has dubbed the denizens of World Net Daily "fake Christians".

Yes, in this match made in Alterno-Heaven, two bodies vying for the title of Most Likely To Have Missed the "Judge Not" Parts furiously dig in to the micro-parsing of Otherness.

"And in this we may find our own salvation", I began to write. "As ineffective as we liberals have been fighting hate-driven waves of racism, gay-baiting, and Christian fundamentalism, we may find relief in the Right's increasing interior battles over who is truly Other. As we've seen with Palin, the Tea Partiers, and the most extreme of right-wing politicians, the conservative fringe may well serve to implode the Republican party."

But with that conclusion, I myself compound the problem. From the freaked-out new minority gathered at the feet of Glenn Beck, to those who close their pocketbooks to a Muslim hate crime victim and displaced flood victims in Pakistan - these are people acting out of ignorance and fear, the chief ingredients of hatred. By reducing them to their worst components, I paint them as the hopeless Others. I concede them as unreachable, as unteachable, as enemies to be vanquished, not to win over. And in that – don't I, too, capitalize on the specter of the Others, to the loss of us all?

It's easy. It's a proven way to get Like, or Followed, or Fanned. And it doesn't do a damned thing to forward our recovery as a country, let alone the cause of the human race.