Peg Herring, Mystery Author

Many of us start looking for the perfect gift around this time. (If you're one of those people who's had your shopping done since July 12th, I still love you.) There are lots of ways to go about finding things to make those around us happy, but I've been thinking of something you might not have considered. Why not give people the right to be different from you? Consider if you will how much stress--family, community, national, and international--would disappear if we didn't insist on being right. Football fans call rival teams terrible names, and their fans must be stupid if they cheer for them. Men and women make nasty jokes about the other gender's supposed weaknesses. Kids take note of the differences between them and conclude Not Like Me means bad. I don't think they come to that belief on their own. Internet philosophers speculate on the oddness--and therefore the wrongness--of this person or that group. People of different cultures are lumpe