The theme of this post is prejudice.

My parents are adding on to their house, and my mother said I could pick out the furniture for the new family room. Only a couple of weeks ago, she sent me an email that said she had just bought all of the furniture for the new family room.

Naturally, I was crushed, but I salvaged a bad situation by making her promise that when she bought a new computer, as she was just about to do, she would buy a Macintosh I picked out for her.

So last night, I took her to the Apple Store, and we emerged with a brand-new, beautiful, gleaming-white iBook.

She was proud of her purchase until we got home and my father and evil brothers started sniping about it. “Apple is a cult,” my brother Steven said. “Why don’t you get a real computer?” my brother Tim said. My father demanded to know who had bought such an abominable thing into the house.

These are people who had never even seen an Apple computer before, much less used one. They know literally nothing about them, but they had already made up their minds that my mother’s new computer was some sort of heretical blunder. “Who will help her when she has problems?” they demanded, as if she were ascending K2 with nothing but a toothbrush.

Meanwhile, she picked it up right out of the box and was able to figure out how to use it instantly, something she never managed in all her years of using my father’s Windows machine.

The moral of this story is that we will never as a species achieve any sort of lasting peace unless we stop making up our minds about things we know nothing about.

Or until we all run out and buy Macintoshes.