The US hit the 300 million mark for population today, according to the Census Bureau (and who'd argue with those guys?). The world as a whole is apparently up around 6.6 billion.

I remember the days when we were lounging around with only 250mil, and the world had barely cracked 5 billion. Those days are gone . . . unless some world-wide pandemic wipes out all the cities and leaves only the nice people of Arkansas and Montana to duke it out with anyone left in the Australian Outback, until the zombies come and eat their brains.

Mmmmm, braaaaaains.

Ahem.

I did a term paper in the late 1980s on trends in immigration in Boston, comparing the highest point of Irish immigration to the (then) current largest group, the Vietnamese. The paper discussed the ways in which people in the late 18, early 1900s discouraged the Irish from coming here, by refusing them jobs or homes or places to eat, and how that pattern of "Not in My Town!" was repeated with the Vietnamese. . . .

And with virtually every large influx of immigrants since then.

Now to state the obvious: my parents were the children of immigrants, or their parents were, except for one grandmother, whose grandmother was Mi'kmaq, from Nova Scotia. We think; records are sketchy. But everyone I know has parents, grandparents, greats or great-greats that were born elsewhere. Hell, even those who came over in boats or on the backs of yaks or what-have-you from Mongolia 10,000 years ago weren't orginally from here. No one was. 'Cept the turkeys. And maybe not even them. Yet people continue to freak out over every group of immigrants as if it's the first one, or the worst one, or whatever.

Get over it already! Sheesh.