As you drive west on Speedway Boulevard toward I-10, you come to an underpass and a sign that reads: "Underpass: Do Not Enter When Flooded." That worries me; it's like having a mandatory sign in bathrooms that reads: "Caution: Do Not Bathe While Holding A ctive Power Tools."

Signs like the former are necessary, however, because of what author Terry Goodkind calls the Wizard's First Rule - that is, "People are stupid." They believe what they want, whether it is true or not, usually because it is the easiest thing to believe. Sadly enough, that rule is responsible for more than flooded hatchback engines and electrified bathers - it is, I believe, the root cause of racism.

With the sudden increase in Middle East tensions following the election of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the subsequent practice of what may not be the most enlightened approach to foreign affairs by his administration, I have had the no-longer uni que privilege of hearing more anti-Semitic and anti-Arabic trash than ever before in my 20 years of life.

Nor does the hate stop at peoples indigenous to northern Africa; let's not forget that white supremacist groups and the Black Panthers are still fixtures in the underbelly of American society.

Statistics on hate crimes - those crimes perpetrated with a group-biased motive - have only been kept by the FBI for the last few years, so increases or decreases in the same cannot be accurately determined. In 1993, for example, considered the first reas onably accurate year for these reports, hate crimes in the United States numbered 7,587 incidents. It is further estimated that this number may be only one-third of the actual total incidents, since reporting is often skewed. The same experts who estimate the discrepancy also believe that the incidence of these crimes has risen in the last few years.

As a society, we try to come to grips with this problem and to work around it. Mothers counsel their children, when those same children are confronted by the hatred of others, with what has become a maxim of liberal ideology: "People fear what they don't understand."

I don't know about you, but I have no problem with what I don't understand; I fear some things that I do understand, like premature hair loss and the fact that Dallas Cowboys' fans are truly scarce during losing seasons but appear in droves for Super Bowl years. People might, however, hate what they don't understand, and fall victim to the first rule in attempting to cope with it. It is easier to say, "Someone, somewhere, is responsible for my pain," than to admit, "I'm at fault," or "Shit happens."

Ordinarily, I like to offer a problem and a witty, usually sarcastic, answer to the little conundrum; this time, I have no flippant response. Racism is, I feel, like a hurricane. You can recognize it, avoid it, or as a last resort take measures to lessen its effect, but ultimately, it will hit, and standing in its path overanalyzing it is not going to do anything except get you drenched, if you're lucky.

I am certainly not arguing that racism should be tolerated; far from it. I am, however, arguing that there is no simple, or, perhaps, complete solution to this problem. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been dead for over 30 years, and most of us still hav en't caught on to what he was talking about. Sesame Street has been trying for over 20 years to teach children, whom we generally regard as the hope of the future and who are at an impressionable age, that people are people, regardless of what they look l ike on the outside.

If Jim Henson and Dr. Martin Luther King could not help us past the first rule, I desperately fear that no one can.

Chris Badeaux is a junior majoring in English. His column 'Cynic on Parade,' appears every other Friday.

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