Give 'em Hell Alabama!

As you can see I've dedicated my blog to University of Alabama football this season. It looks like Bama has a good chance of winning a national championship this year, the first time since 1992, which was my senior year. To say I was close to the team would be an understatement. They were like family. My roommate hung out with Kevin Lee and I briefly dated John Copeland. We hung out with all the players, not as groupies looking for husbands (because there were many of those) but as college students who enjoyed spending time together. I even went to church with the coach, Gene Stallings. For years I've been looking forward to seeing my Tide return to its former days of glory. And yes, I have been neglecting my blog duties, the main point of which is to make both you and me think.

For the past few months there have been lots of interesting things happening in the news. Outrage spread across the nation amongst conservatives when President Obama made a speech to school children and paranoid conservatives accused him of "indoctrination" without so much as even hearing his speech. Then when the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, even the faithful jumped ship to declare "the president hasn't done anything yet". Everyone fell in lock-step with the opinion that he had been given the prize not for what he has done, but for what he wants to accomplish. But I disagree. Even if that was their reason, I disagree with the concept that getting elected the first black president of the United States, a great nation with a history of slavery and discrimination, is "nothing".

For one day in November 2008 this country, and by consequence the entire world, faced the very real possibility of electing the wrong people to office, expanding the war in Iraq, and doing nothing to support the economy except wait for wealth to trickle down and for the economy to fix itself. But that didn't happen because the person with different ideas had the ability to make us see past his race and get himself elected. He took a nation, half of which would feel significantly more comfortable with someone who looks like their own fathers in office, and he did what no one else in history has been able to do: he changed their minds. And in doing so he created a paradigm shift for the human race. Now the leader of the free world finally, for the first time in history, actually looks like the rest of the world. Are you seriously telling me that this historical achievement isn't worth recognizing?

There is no such office as "President of the World" because if there was Obama would have won it. The Nobel Peace Prize is the next best thing and the closest the world can get to telling us they are, for the first time in eight years, willing to follow our leader. Is it about race? Yes and no. He didn't get elected because of his race, but he certainly could have lost the election and even world support because of it. Like it or not, he and his achievements are a symbol of our nation's progress and awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize was recognition for creating that progress. But, this blog is called "Mind Massage" so in the spirit of massaging your mind I'd like to offer a different view, one that one of my friends, Malika, offered me when I shared my opinion with her:

"Well, if that's the case then they needed to have created a new category".


Hmmmmm......

Did I mention Malika used to be my boss?


Then last night the House of Representatives passed healthcare reform and now my conservative friends are livid. And what do I think about that? I think it's a step in the right direction and the main people who are opposing it will, just like the "Cash for Clunkers" program, be the main people who exploit it once it becomes law.

I think insurance companies need to be put in check and should be required to pay for care for "pre-existing conditions" if a person and their company have been paying their insurance premiums.

I think doctors and medical schools should put greater emphasis on identifying symptoms in their infancy and providing preventive care. And insurance benefits should pay for preventive care such as the use of vitamins and supplements to change what's going wrong inside a person's body, instead of waiting until an illness is chronic, a tumor has formed, a gland has stopped producing the right level of hormones, or an artery is clogged.

I think the FDA needs to stop allowing food sources, food processes and food additives to make us all sick, and pharmaceutical companies need to stop being allowed to sell us "cures" that cause even more and greater illnesses.

I think instead of rushing products to market both the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies need to do more research and take the time to create foods and cosmetics that are pure and healthy, and medicines that can actually make people better.

And finally, I think that if the blue dog Democrats didn't pass the bill that's a good sign there's something wrong with it. I heard Governor Haley Barber, a Mississippi Republican, say that both Democrats and Republicans could agree on 80% of the bill. So what if you think he's a redneck? It's their country too. And just because Republicans wouldn't work across party lines or even preserve basic constitutional rights when they were in power doesn't mean Democrats should continue the pattern now that they are in power. Democrats should take the high road. The Senate needs to do the work to trim away the 20% that the blue dogs were opposed to and make the bill a true bi-partisan effort. And if it doesn't fix the problems I listed above then it needs to be revamped until it does.

But enough about that. All of these things are going to have to continue to pass without any more commentary from me. For the time being my heart and my attention lie closer to home. In the coming weeks as we watch the Tide continue to roll, I'll be right here cheering "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, Give 'em Hell Alabama!"

Serena William's 2009 US Open Foot Fault

This is, so far, the best story I've found on Serena William's US Open foot fault incident. The foot fault call had suspicious timing. I play tennis and we all pretty much do the same thing on every serve. If Serena did have a foot fault it is highly unlikely that the first one came at match point. So why call that foot fault on that particular serve? Serena's anger was justified but there is no way to excuse the way she expressed it. If the tournament officials had let her get away with that tantrum they would have been accused of showing favoritism to a celebrity.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, let me catch you up. Serena Williams was playing Kim Clijsters in the 2009 US Open tournament in New York. Clijsters had won the first set 6-4 and was leading the second set 6-5 but Serena was serving at 15-30. Which means that Clijsters needed 2 ponts to win the match and Serena needed 4 points to stay in and go to a tie break. As Serena was serving, a line judge, a small asian woman, called a foot fault on Serena's second serve. This means that Serena Williams, a woman with 31 aces, more than any woman in the whole tournament, the next being her opponent Clijsters who had 14, had double-faulted due to a foot fault call. Serena lost her temper, walked towards the judge lifting a tennis ball in her fist and reportedly saying "I am going to shove this*** ball down your *** throat." I watched the match on TV and couldn't hear it. But whatever she said, she kept talking and lifted her racket club-like at the woman, using it to make her point.

Afterward Serena turned around to continue serving and the woman got up and walked over to the chair umpire's desk and told the chair umpire her version of what had just happened. The Chair umpire called out the tournament supervisor and the referee and they met with Serena at the side of the court. During that meeting you could hear Serena clearly say "Are you scared because I said I was going to hit you? I'm sorry." And later she said "I did not say I was going to kill her!" She was visibly shocked that the woman had felt threatened by her.

Should Serena apologize? The answer is clearly yes she should for making someone feel threatened. I am worried about Serena. I wonder if the whispers and questions about her size may actually be cause for concern. Does she want it bad enough to use performance enhancing drugs? I don't know. I saw her in an earlier inteview after a different match and I noticed that she was moving her facial muscles erratically. I remember thinking "Wow, that must be all that residual tension releasing. She must have been really holding herself in and controlling herself to now lose control and start making so many faces like that." It was really odd. But to see her come uncoiled on the court, I felt so badly for her because I knew that later when she calmed down she would regret those moments.

If I were Serena I would use this experience consructively to do for foot faults what John McEnroe and shot spot did for bad ball calls. We know they happen. Help implement a system to challenge them. She has the resources to obtain every tape and video camera footage of that moment that she can get her hands on and have it all reviewed. I don't know for sure what it would show but probably something along the lines of numerous foot faults happening on both sides of the court by both players. That could be a driving force to remove a bit more of the human bias out of the judging system. This issue has existed for a long time. It needs to be settled once and for all and Serena is just the woman to do it. Then she can go down in history not as the "angry black woman" stereotype who lost it in a major tournament, but as the woman who took control of a situation that has plagued too many for too long and she finally set it right.

***Originally I had the actual swear words in this post, but have removed them because they offended some people who are very important to me. As humans, we all sometimes say things we wish we hadn't and, if people are kind, they will forget those things and let us be judged by how we treat people the other 99.9% of our lives when we are kind and generous and humane. It's not fair to freeze our worst moments in time.

What Happened at "The Shack"?

OK, I haven't blogged in a while. Actually I have but decided that I'd written things that didn't need to be posted. But today a friend of mine on Facebook asked me for my unbiased opinion about the bestselling book, "The Shack". A flood within me was unleashed and below is what came out. Enjoy...

I've read "The Shack". It took me a while to warm up to it because of the style of writing, but after I did I loved it! I think the concepts in the book reflect my essential truth, which is that we are all here for each other, to be in relationships with each other, to know each other and to love each other. And that judging and condemning each other for ANY thing under ANY circumstances is the worst possible thing we can do. Now here is my controversial opinion: I am glad that God is presented as female in several forms because that is a truth I've known and struggled with for a long time. Biblical written tradition would have us believe that all deity is male. That is a Middle Eastern social construct which snuck in and inserted itself into Biblical tradition because the authors were from the Middle East!. Hellooo....that's where women have to cover their faces! The Bible was oral to begin with - no writings. It was never meant to be frozen in time by words and stuck in the social customs of some other time and place.

Ok, now having said that, I don't mean to say that God is female. I mean to say that I believe The Bible when it says that God is neither male nor female, which means he loves us all equally.NOW as a good Christian girl I have to say that I still believe that women are the gentler, fairer sex. As such we have a calling, per se', not to declare ourselves stronger and rub it in men's faces. It is BECAUSE we are the gentler, fairer sex that we should introduce and wield the truth gently, lest we end up in the same place that the so-called feminist movement / equal rights left us which is having women to do ALL the work and ALL the decision-making. That's not how it was intended. Men are stronger in some things, women in others, but the differences cancel each other out. Women are not meant to be heads of the household, not any household, not God's nor Man's, but it is because we want men to be stronger :-) not because they actually are.

My Inauguration Experience

I arrived in Washington D.C. on a Sunday afternoon and the father of a friend of a friend of a girl I'd never met before picked me up at the Metro station and drove me to the apartment I would be renting for the three nights visit. He was very kind and friendly and showed me around the place, then left me to get settled in with assurance that I was only a short walk from where the bus would pick me up to take me to the nearest Metro station. He drove away and I was left alone in Fairfax, Virginia thinking everything was settled. I was going to meet other travelers from Omaha that night in downtown D.C. for dinner.

I unpacked and then went outside and waited. The bus never came. Eventually I walked back towards the apartment building and tapped on the car window of a hispanic man, and asked him if I was waiting in the right place. He pointed at a bench and I walked back. A few minutes later he pulled up beside me in an old Ford mustang. "The bus probably isn't coming this late on a Sunday" he said "Can I give you a ride somewhere?" Don’t try this at home, but I scanned him quickly to see if I felt safe with him. I did, and I got into his car and thanked him. I would later learn that his name was Jorge, a 13-year veteran of the marine corps, an employee at a large engineering firm, and a gentleman. “I’m not doing anything the next few days” he said, “and I have the day off. Call me if you need anything.” And with that he had offered me his card.

Not wanting to impose on Jorge, I tried riding the bus again the next day, but it still didn’t come. After waiting for almost an hour in the cold I thought about calling a cab but my cell phone was dead and I had accidentally packed my charger in the wrong suitcase. I had to be at the Hart Senate office by 4:00pm to pick up my ticket. It was only about 9:00am but I knew that time moved fast and using the Metro and waiting in line I could run out of time quickly. I walked a little along the sidewalk in the suburbs looking for someone who I could ask to borrow their cell phone and fished in my purse for Jorge’s card. He came and offered me a ride to buy a new charger as well. I bought him lunch and he spent the day with me in D.C., waiting in line to pick up my ticket at the Hart Senate building and then patiently shopping with me at the mall at a place appropriately named “Friendship station”.

After the inauguration was over I had to make one last trip to the Metro to get to Reagan National airport. My landlady, the girl whose apartment I was borrowing but whom I had never met, came to pick me up early in the morning. Just like everyone else I’d met during my experience she was kind and sweet and very gracious.

People are asking me what feels like a million questions about my inauguration experience.
"Did it feel historic?" Yes, very. I got goose bumps and cried when Aretha Franklin sang. "Were there mostly black people?" I don't know but I don't think so. There was no race out there. Just people. "Did you go to an inaugural ball?" No, I had tickets to the Garden State (New Jersey) Ball but I was too exhausted to attend.

The one question that no one asks is "Did you meet any interesting people?” That’s the one I want to talk about most. Because, you see, I met and chatted with tons of people but the ones who were the kindest, the ones who I leaned on the most and who offered me hospitality throughout my visit: Jorge, the girl whose apartment I borrowed at the last minute who got up early Wednesday morning to drive me to the airport, her father who directed me through my first trip to the Metro, picked me up and showed me around.....they were all Republicans. None of them had anything at all to do with Democrats or the inauguration. They were just citizens of the city who wanted to reach out and be a part of this historical event in the best way they could.

Am I proud of Obama? Of course. Do I have high hopes for him? I think anyone who can do what he's done can do almost anything. But the person, or rather people, I am most proud of is us, the American people. Both the Democrats who saw past race and came together to elect Obama and now the Republicans who can see past politics to offer their support in a time when our nation is experiencing perhaps the greatest surge of unity since before the civil war - just when we need it most.

I just finished reading this and I thought how can we ever unite the rest of the world if we don't have unity ourselves? Perhaps the greatest threat to our nation is not anything outside of us, not the Taliban and not war in the Middle East. It is partisanship and the idea that our values have to keep us apart. The solution - get to know each other, call on your neighbors.

Update on the Conspiracy to Kidnap My Mail

For those of you who read "Christmas in the Modern Era" and were sad or upset when I said "no one will ever love me - ever", calm down, I was only kidding. People love me.

The cards came later. Some of them arrived on time and I just hadn't picked them up yet because I'd been out of town. It's mostly my own fault I'm not getting my mail. To fix the mail problem, I went online to the post office web site and temporarily changed my address so that everything will go to the PO Box. When I do the "permanent change" I will incorporate my street address into it even though they have different zip codes. Take that, post office!