THE STRANGEST THING HAPPENED TO ME Tuesday morning at Montgomery County Community College. There I was, minding my own business, when this crazy old white guy lunged at my throat. Fortunately I was able to beat off my attacker with my camera, but it was a close call, I want to tell you. I was able to provide police with a good description of the man because I took this picture at the moment he went berserk.

Whew! A couple of more inches and he would have shaken my hand.

I kid the Republican nominee for president of the United States. John McCain is a good man. Out of his freakin' mind, but a good man nonetheless. I stood in a gymnasium full of suburban Republicans to listen to John McCain's speech at MC3, and I came away with this impression of the crowd:

These people look just like me, and yet we have nothing in common. They were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly middle aged -- if we can call 60 the new middle age. I counted -- and it was easy -- two black faces in a crowd of perhaps 2,000 people who had come to hear McCain. Middle aged white men. Middle aged white women. Lots of grandchildren. Lots of under-voting-age youngsters. But virtually noone of color or obvious recent-immigrant background. The two black faces belonged to stylishly dressed professional women. I saw one Asian male. What I didn't see were more than a handful of people of any race, color or creed over the age of 20 and under that age of 45.

So what does that mean? You tell me.

Everyone that age was at work, you could say. But how do you explain the disproportionate number of school-age children. As far as I know, Tuesday was a school day as well as a work day in Montgomery County. McCain's visit was important enough for the kids to skip school, but not for their mothers or fathers to miss work. Is that a fair observation?

What struck me also was the evident ill-ease many in the crowd communicated, with body language and comments, about being on a college campus. I heard remarks I haven't heard since 1968 from some of the people standing in line outside the Phys Ed Building waiting to enter the two auditoriums where the candidate spoke either live or via video screen.

"Why don't they get a job?" one middle aged lady groused about the nine college-aged "protesters" (five white, four black, seven men, two women) who were ordered by the Secret Service to stand about 40 yards away from the McCain supporter's queue. To which I thought to myself, "Because they're college students, lady. And guess what? They probably all have jobs to pay their way through community college."

I kept waiting for someone to shout, "Get a haircut." but the only hippie length hair was on a white guy with a modest 'fro. These were the most polite demonstrators you ever saw. And all they did was stand silently holding Obama-Biden signs, with one comedian-provocatuer occassionally shouting barely loud enough to be heard, "Liberals do it better."

What struck me as comical was how so many in this Republican crowd seemed to take offense at this modest demonstration of political dissent on a college campus. These kids were as polite as the first black demonstrators who tried to sit at a lunch counter at Woolworths in the Deep South in the early 1960's. "Why do you refuse to serve me?" I remember one young man repeating to a mortified waitress as he was being led away in handcuffs on the TV news when I was a kid.

"They make me sick," I heard a Republican lady say about the Obama supporters at Montgomery County Community College.

We've come a long way in America, but we have miles to go before we sleep.