Lethal Weapon 3 was the most romantic movie ever made. That's the one where Mel Gibson and Rene Russo meet and have a whirlwind romance. There's no moonlight and roses, but they bust some crooked cops and Mel Gibson makes friends with a Rottweiller. Its all about two people meeting and falling in love. They go through the whole "flirting" stage where she beats up the four guys in the chop shop. There's that whole scene where they finally get together, when they are comparing scars and bullet holes and then wind up making out on the floor. And in the end their relationship is cemented, when she takes a bullet for him. That's love. Better than anything with Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan.

I mean, come on! Sleepless in Seattle? The kids in that movie were more interesting than the two adults, and the main characters don't even appear onscreen together until the last 5 seconds of the movie. You've Got Mail? Aren't they both a bit old to be playing romantic leads? And, again, there's no real romance; its all the love-hate/unresolved-sexual-tension/Moonlighting kind of thing that they try to resolve in the last few seconds of the movie.

But Lethal Weapon movies are different. They have real characters with real feelings. Murtaugh has a family and he's responsible and he loves them and even kills a lot of people for them. That's family values. Riggs goes from being a suicidal manic depressive in the first movie to when he finally becomes a father and gets married in Lethal Weapon 4. That's personal growth and responsibility. And what about race relations? Even the Chinese people in the last movie all got along with them....well, except the ones they killed. They made friends with all different kinds of people, like Joe Pesci, Rene Russo, Chris Rock.

In a way it was kind of like baseball. What I mean is, like basketball is mostly black guys and genetically-engineered giants from Eastern Europe. Hockey is almost all white guys. Football is white and black, and maybe a few Hispanics but not too many. And sure lots of people play soccer, but that's different because they all have their own teams, you know, like the team from Venezuela will play the team from Malaysia. There's nothing wrong with that! But baseball is different. Baseball is for everybody, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian. They say its the great American Past-Time, but they play it in Canada, Cuba, and even Japan. People love it!

You know what else people love? The Doobie Brothers. They're black, they're white, they have a great sound. Hardly any other band I can think of has black and white people in it. The only other ones that come to mind are Hootie & The Blowfish and Josie & The Pussycats. And one of them is a cartoon. I always thought the Monkees should have had a black guy. I mean, sure, some people would have screamed that he was the "token black guy", but Davy Jones was the "token British guy" and Mike Nesmith was the "token guy with talent".

Anyway, I think those should be our models for race relations: Lethal Weapon, baseball, and the Doobie Brothers. They're much better examples than all those kids' TV shows that will show a black kid, a white kid, an Asian, a Native American and a kid in a wheelchair all playing together. Like Sesame Street or Captain Planet. Because there the kids are either 1) stereotypes, 2) way too well-informed, and give detailed lectures about the culture and history of their people, or 3) bland and completely interchangable.

That's not how it was on Lethal Weapon. I mean, Roger was black and he was sensitive to things like Apartheid or those Chinese immigrants who were sold as cheap labor to sweatshops. At the same time, he wasn't a stereotype hip-hop urban streetwise thug, you know, he was a family man with old-fashioned values, and at the same time he had his own concerns and his own perspective. But he took Martin in and made him part of his family.

You see, the message is not that everyone is the same; its that everyone is different. Everyone has individual concerns and needs. Some groups of people might tend to be more sensitive to certain issues, but those can be resolved and everyone can get along.

They say America is a melting pot. I think that's crap. That implies that everyone who comes here has to be absorbed into one great mass and lose all their individuality. I think its more like a salad bowl, where everyone can contribute to the whole salad but still retain their individuality and identify themselves as a tomato or a carrot stick.

I think the world would be a much better place if we all acted more like the guys from Lethal Weapon. Except we shouldn't shoot people so much or say the "F" word