Duff McKagan’s column runs every Thursday on Reverb. Check back on Monday when he writes about what’s playing on his iPod.As you might imagine, after writing for Seattle Weekly as long as I have, there are going to be comments that go against me or my topic. No problem. I am a big boy and have learned to deal with criticism, from my early days of playing punk rock when it wasn’t so popular to being in a huge band starting in my early 20s. Writers, jocks, and certain fans have been criticizing me or my bands for the past 30 years! That is simply part of the deal. Ask Krist Novoselic about this sometime, and I am sure he would concur. Our careers have oddly mirrored one another, now being colleagues as writers and all. Damn, I am a parent and get criticized daily by my almost-teenage daughters. That is part of life.I have always had a sort of unspoken motto and daily regimen. I try to clear my thoughts upon waking in the morning, to approach each day without the baggage of the day before. Life is just too short to act on day-old baggage. So here I am, a guy who from the outside may appear always to be looking on the bright side or some such thing. It’s just that I try to get it right TODAY and not sweat what happened yesterday. Enough about me.I have written about some of the darker comments I have received during my tenure here at the Weekly. I have commented on how people nowadays can get pretty damn brazen whilst hidden behind their computer. It is our new paradigm and dilemma. This last week, however, I have made comments back to a couple of people, either because I thought they were too insulting to the people who read and comment on my column, or because they were being racist and ignorant. On Mondays, the Weekly releases an “I’ve Been Listening To . . .” feature that I do in which I talk about what’s playing on my iPod. It is really just a forum for people to write in about music, with me simply starting the conversation. Music is something I like to write about because there is no downside. Art has no definition. I write on stuff that I like, and I like a TON of different stuff. If there is something I don’t like, I don’t write about it (see paragraph 2 above). I recently received a comment that was so racist and bigoted that it left me feeling bummed out and a bit mortified. I won’t repeat it here, and it’s since been deleted from my column.In this day and age, with our youth having access to technology and information right at their collective fingertips, you would think that a broader diversity would hasten forward along with it. But there are always going to be creeps, I guess . . .Before I get too off-topic here, I want to ask some of you what you think about diversity awareness. We here in America, at this point in our history, should have about one of everything (ethnicity, religion, bi/straight/homo, punk, hip-hop, right-wing, left-wing, etc) in your family-chain somewhere, right?Racism and bigotry are by no means exhibited only on the Internet. Calls of right-wing racism are being heard daily now against factions of the Republican Party. I don’t know about this, because I don’t trust ANY partisan rhetoric these days. As for the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world calling Obama a racist, the one thing I can say is that Mr. Limbaugh is a wack-job who knows how to keep his frightened listeners dialed in to his show.We all inhaled in dumbfounded astonishment a couple of years back when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that there was no such “problem” as homosexuality in his country. Last Friday, he made his yearly statement that there was no such thing as the Holocaust. It simply didn’t happen, according to him. It is a Jewish lie . . .After the terror attacks of 9/11, many of us in America and Europe were so frightened and afraid that a widespread bigotry against ALL Muslims saw a sharp rise. Many of us were simply uneducated. Our worldview can at times be extremely skewed to the West. Education is key here, don’t you think?When President Bush and his advisers decided that it was a good idea to invade Iraq, I sure wish that someone in his cabinet would have read one of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s books on Middle Eastern conflict and tribal warfare, which has gone back to antiquity (From Beirut to Jerusalem or Longitudes and Attitudes). I think our soldiers deserve to be as well-prepared as possible. Education about the region they were about to invade should have been a larger part of their training. (As an aside, another great author on this subject is Dexter Filkins. I am reading The Forever War right now. It’s fascinating and really eye-opening).Oddly enough for me, at a back-to-school parent/teacher night I attended last Monday, I was delighted to listen to a talk given by the woman who leads the diversity program at the school. What I came away with was that my kids are getting the information they need that will keep them from being racially ignorant or ignorant of world religions. In my older child’s middle school, they are covering the Middle East, apartheid, terrorism, and the Cold War and how it affected the Soviet people at the time. Heady stuff, yes, but I am pleased as can be that my child is getting a worldview at her young age.Another teacher at the school highlighted that the kids will be covering Internet predators and the “cyber-bully” syndrome this year. Guest speakers will be coming in throughout the year. This is what our children have to deal with these days.Anyhow, I am not quite sure if I have a clear and defining point this week–rather I am just sort of checking in and getting some things off my chest. If nothing else, I hope that some discourse will happen because of this week’s subject matter. Thanks for reading . . .– Duff