Category: Politics

My heart rate is through the roof!

Denied!

First, let me be real clear that I pretty much hate U.S. big money college athletics at a fairly visceral level. That’s a long story, tied up in deep ways with growing up in Texas, and we won’t go there. Suffice it to say that I have real problems with the whole deal.

Second, let me be equally clear that I don’t hate the kids involved; I’m not into blaming the victims in a deeply screwed up system. I may not go to UMM‘s games, but I was happy for them when they won the UMAC this semester, and when Coach Ken Crandall got named UMAC coach of the year. Ken’s served on our Scholastic Committee with me for several years, and he’s a valuable campus resource on many levels, and it’s too bad (for us) that his success had led to him being recruited away.

Now all that’s out of the way, I just watched a little more than the last quarter of the Fiesta Bowl, where Boise State eeked out an absolutely amazing, heart stopping, wildly exciting, oh-my-god, lots of four letter words and screaming and shouting victory over the Oklahoma University. Boise were underdogs going in, and some OU folks were apparently talking a lot of trash in advance of the game, and it was really nice to see a smaller program beat a major football power (i.e., a school with some pretty confused educational priorities) like OU.

And not only did they win, but they won in the most exciting possible way. After leading most of the game, they let OU take the lead in the waning moments, then tied it in the last seconds, and then squeeked it out in overtime. By the end we were all in Mom and Dad’s bedroom (Dad had been watching the game there), and while Dad couldn’t scream and shout (his voice is currently quite weak from radiation), we did plenty of it for him. It was probably a lot more excitement then a cancer patient needed, but once we were sucked in there was really no coming out again. Congrats to the underdogs!

Now I should be getting some sleep, but my adrenaline levels are so high, it’s not really an option. I’ll have to read or something to wind down…

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Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer




Impact

Originally uploaded by darkmatter.

Those wild and crazy people at WalkingTimeBomb.com have a whole host of ads aimed at college students who blithely assume (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that they’ll quit smoking after they graduate. Some of them are pretty strange and don’t make a lot of sense, but some are real winners:

Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is not harmful as long as you only do it socially.

When I’m at the bar I like to smack myself in the face a few times with a good claw hammer. So what? Who am I hurting? Or the other day I was walking along with Joe and he pulled out a shiny ball-peen model. Man, we just went to town with that baby. But what of it? I don’t plan on being one of those life-long hammerers. I’ll just quit after I graduate by tapering off with some of those small rubber mallets.

Generally I’m a pretty libertarian kind of guy, and I rarely give students grief about their smoking even though they bloody well ought to know better. Going through this cancer fight with Dad, though, makes it tough not to run around shouting at students that I see smoking.

The problem is that the claim that smoking (or not wearing a seatbelt or a bicycle helmet or whatever) only hurts the fool is based on a sad and ultimately unacceptable assumption that there is and will be no love in that person’s world when the odds come for their due. To watch my mother hold Dad while he’s vomiting again in the middle of the night, to hear her voice break on the phone after spending another all-nighter with him at the hospital, all this shatters any arguments that the impact of these choices is limited.

We are people, and that has implications.

When my father started smoking in the early 40’s, there was no broad understanding of the horrible risks involved, and as that data became clearer the tobacco industry spent millions to confuse and obfuscate the issues. At some point when I was a kid (late 60’s, early 70’s) Dad became convinced and stopped cold, an action I have always admired.

Today’s students can’t claim ignorance, and I sure as hell hope they don’t plan on lonely, loveless lives. I know that I have higher aspirations for them…

Tags: cancer, Family, health, public health, smoking

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