Two Quick Hits in a row? Your karma is clearly improving!
What I remember about 9/11
If you ask me, and the fact that you haven’t is utterly immaterial, aside from becoming a bastion of abject stupidity, Facebook has become way too preachy. Everyone thinks they’re superior by virtue of a better youth, they know cursive, and we’re all expected to share stupid shit or be deemed unpatriotic.
“Wait a minute, Jeff Ward! Aren’t you the premier pontificator on those social media pages?”
Au contraire adoring throng! Whenever you see a portal to my impressive prose, if you choose, you can scroll past it faster than the Grand Cheeto skips a third debate.
Of course, whenever September rolls around, the 9/11 memes become predominant, and while we certainly should remember those lives cut short, I’m still waiting for the kind of reckoning that would be an annual event if the terrorist attack occurred during the Obama administration.
Because the truth is 9/11 was the kind of massive intelligence failure that put Pearl Harbor to shame. And that inexcusable lapse came at the hands of the Party that proudly proclaims only they can protect America.
It doesn’t begin to pass the laugh test, either. As most of you know, I’m quite familiar with the FBI, an enterprise that was convinced I was the Unabomer. But despite being well aware of the situation, they somehow decided that Arabic flight students who couldn’t be bothered to learn how to land weren’t worth pursuing.
Then, just for good measure, the misanthropic CIA ignored their female agents’ warnings of the imminent attack.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, instead of providing badly needed leadership, President George W. Bush ran and hid like a rabbit terrified of its own shadow. Then we invaded Afghanistan, and not Saudi Arabia, despite their obvious financial and individual involvement, And that didn’t work out too well for that country now did it!
Because it was the Republicans who presided over that disaster, and the Democrats lack the teeth to truly tackle the issue, there’s been no such come-to-Jesus 9/11 moment. And the GOP further obscures their complicity by attacking any critical voice as a lack of respect for the deceased.
Then, just to make matters worse, Bush and his minions added an entirely new level of “Homeland Security” bureaucracy that serves no purpose other than spying on Americans.
But if a Democratic administration made those same 9/11 blunders, the Republicans would be using it in attack ads to this day. And the lack of a reckoning or any meaningful intelligence reform means only one thing. It’s going to happen again.
Don’t let your children play football
We’ve tackled this tough topic before. Because while human evolution generally can’t keep up with the vagaries of a digital, processed food, and climate change stricken world, it has absolutely no problem outpacing sports.
Back in the Bears’ 1980s heyday, if you had the talent and a little speed, folks my 188 lb. six-foot size frame could successfully compete in the NFL. Former Bears Gary Fencik and Doug Plank are all the proof you need. Legendary Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton was a scant 6 foot, 190 lbs.
But now the average NFL quarterback weighs in at 6’ 3.5” and 225 pounds and we won’t even talk about the behemoth linemen. They’re faster than my high school 4.4 40 speed, too. And now this increasing size and speed shift is starting at the middle and high school levels to the point where the game has become patently unsafe to play.
Last year, three teenage football players died of head injuries, with another ten perishing from heat-related issues. This year’s season isn’t even half over and we’ve already seen another three head trauma deaths and seven more heat stroke fatalities.
As a brief aside, any coach who presides over a heat-related player death should be charged with negligent homicide.
To be fair, when you consider the 1,028,000 U.S. high school football players, those deaths seem almost immaterial, but football-related deaths were virtually unheard of in my youth. When was the last time you heard of a youth lacrosse, baseball, or basketball player dying from a practice-related or in-game injury?
Even the NFL is finally catching onto this outsized dynamic in the form of their greatly modified kickoff return rules. They finally realized there’s nothing quite like having a 300-pound linebacker bear down on you with a 40-yard running head start.
And when these kids aren’t dying from the sport, they’re suffering the kind of debilitating injuries that will affect them for the rest of their lives. And for what purpose? Just over 1 percent of high school players get a full college ride, and an almost immeasurable 0.023 percent ever get to play a down in the NFL.
Back in 2014, LeBron James, one of the toughest athletes/competitors to ever pick up a basketball, was prescient enough to say he would never let his son play football. It’s time for the rest of us to follow suit.
The Blizzard Theatre just gets worse!
Given our halcyon history with ECC’s Blizzard Theatre, every fall I hold out hope that this season’s offerings will bring back the great memories of Pat Metheny, Dave Mason, Louden Wainwright III, Roger McGuin, and Lewis Black. But alas! Since wokeness has insidiously infected every last aspect of Elgin Community College, every fall, my wife and I are more disappointed.
And this September was the worst.
The general dismay starts off with a mariachi band. I have nothing against mariachi bands, but I wouldn’t pay to see one. Then we move onto Songs and Stories from the Great American Songbook which sounds like the perfect cure for insomnia. From there it’s a Mexican dance troupe, a solo pianist covering Beatles’ songs, Psalms of David (I kid you not), a USO tribute, A Bing Crosby Christmas, a Gershwin “celebration,” The Boy Band Project, and the music of Julie Andrews.
I’d generally have a little more fun with that lineup, but it’s difficult to top the inherent comedic value. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’re fine acts, but they pale in comparison to what the Blizzard formerly offered.
So, now we have a vicious cycle by which these acts fail to draw an audience, so the Blizzard has less money to spend on the next season, and those acts fail to draw an audience, and so forth and so on.
On the bright side, ticket prices are almost half of what they used to be, but I’d rather pay more to see those previously stellar acts.
My fondest wish in consistently covering this steep decline was for ECC to hit rewind and go back to the shows their core audience is willing to show up for, but now it’s too late. Those folks are gone and they’re never coming back.
And neither will my wife and I.
