A few random thoughts…
Well, it’s the holiday season. I love this time of year. With that in mind I will take a brief interlude to opine on a few things only tangentially related to politics…
First, this whole “Green” thing has GOT to stop. I went to my local Large Orange Hardware store on Friday afternoon to buy a Christmas tree. 6-7′ Fraser Fir… Nice tree, good price. There atop the tree was the tag with all the pertinent info about the product and the price. On the front of the tag was a nice picture and a little green bar with the following text:
“Staying Green: This spring, the person who grew this tree will plant another one in its place.”
Really? Wow! How nice. The guy who GROWS TREES FOR A LIVING is going to plant another tree where this one used to be. Man, do I feel like an Eco-warrior now! I think I’m going to start a campaign our of this… imagine, all the farmers replacing the corn that they cut down each year with more corn… and the fields of waving golden wheat that will be replanted where wheat stood the previous fall. This is GREAT!! Pretty soon well be replanting all of our crops every spring in an effort to maintain our green lifestyle!
The sick part is that there were people that actually thought they were doing something for the environment. Doesn’t cutting down a tree of any sort for any reason qualify as grounds for excommunication from the Church of Global Warming? What a load.
Then there was Tim Brando ruining the halftime enjoyment of watching Alabama steamroll the Auburn Tigers. I myself am a Bulldog, but ROLL TIDE!!!! I hope they KILL Florida. Anyway, back to the outrage. So Tim Brando decides (or rather the guys that script him decide) that the resignation of Sylvester Croom marks a good time to bitch and moan about the lack of black coaches in Division I college football. They mentioned that even though (and these are their numbers from my memory not mine) roughly 70% of the players in Division 1 football were “of color’ (again, their words), less than 1% of the coches were. GOOD GRIEF. Are you serious?!! Perhaps we should have a quota system whereby a college has to make sure that there are enough black coaches before they get to hire anyone. Here’s an idea: give two extra scholarship spots to any school that hires a black head coach. This is absolute stupidity and here’s why:
If you want to talk numbers, lets look at the percentage of the US population that is black. Let’s see… nope, it’s not ANYWHERE near the ‘highly representative’ 70% of players that are black. Perhaps we should be limiting the number of black players to a more representative portion of the population. Now we all know that even THINKING about suggesting such a ridiculous system would have me hanging from a yard-arm with the word RACIST carved into my face, but if we’re gonna complain about percentages…
How about this, Brando: The colleges get to hire whomever the heck they think will do the best job (regardless of color) and you guys shut up about race relations. Do you mean to tell me that there is a Division 1 college out there that would actually have the onions to consider not hiring someone because they’re black??? Sylvester Croom was a coach in Mississippi. For those of you who went to a government school, that’s as deep south (read: racist) as you can get. Anyone seen Mississippi State in the rankings recently? No, that’s because they generally only talk about the top 20-25 teams. (For the record, Mississippi State has not ended a season in the AP Top 25 Poll in the last 6 seasons… and that’s as far back as I cared to look.) So perhaps Sylvester Croom, although he’s black and ostensibly a football coach, ISN’T VERY GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES.
What a load of crap this whole argument is. Apparently, the NFL now has a rule that says any team looking for a new head coach HAS to interview a black coach. I guess that means that there aren’t any qualified black head coaches, just the short list that must be interviewed, qualifications be damned.
This type of thought is more divisive than even blatant racism is. At least those who ARE racist are open and up front with the fact that they think that black coaches (or whatever) are less capable. This whole affirmative action garbage purports to be helpful to the very people that it by definition assumes aren’t numerically qualified anyway.
Perhaps there is another reality out there: that existis somewhere in the mists… between the smaller portion of the population that is made up of black people in this country and the fact that there are only 100 some-odd coaching positions out there, amidst the realities that there are only so many men (of any race) that ARE good coaches. A reality wherein the field is becoming narrowed to the point that we have only a few black head coaches in Division 1 football… what a fantasy world that would be. I bet they’d have halftime commentators there that try to talk about stuff other than football…