Out-Punting Our Coverage
March 19, 2013
Any traveler to the Atlantic coast of any Central American country will witness firsthand the arrogance of the human race.
Strewn along almost every shore is the waste of nations outliving their means. Plastic in all shapes and colors, from products of all types – bottles, toys, sandals, tools.
Island nations to the east, unable to cope with the volume of their waste, cast it off covertly under cover of night. Oceangoing vessels large and small heave it overboard.
My wife puts it this way: “We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.” Humans have fantastic abilities to create, but we do so without conscience, without caring enough about consequences.
This clearly applies to the world’s waste problem – from cast-off containers to used cars to computers made obsolete in a matter of months. We keep producing more and more, without plans for the waste of producing new products or the waste created by making existing things obsolete.
In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of trash the size of Texas is circulating as if there were a drain. But there isn’t one. No easy answer to flush human waste – the excrement of our greed – to some other place where it will do no harm.
In Chinese cities today the air, water and land are toxic – much as it was in developing US cities around 1900 – as China takes its turn to poison its people in the name of progress.
That we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. In sports terms, the human race has out-punted its coverage, and the consequences are far more dire than a punt return for a touchdown.
Ali
July 8, 2016
My wife has never held famous athletes and coaches in very high regard. Much of this has to do with her disdain for misplaced priorities – so much attention and extravagant spending devoted to entertainment and sports when so much of the world’s population is without most basic essentials of life.
Because of my work, my wife occasionally has been in the company of some of the biggest names in American sports; but only one clenched her in rapt attention. It was Muhammad Ali.
We were attending a banquet at which Ali was honored. We sat at adjacent tables, with the back of my wife’s chair almost touching the back of the chair to which Ali was being ushered, slowly because of his disease.
We all stood as Ali entered. My wife’s eyes were on Ali; my eyes were on my wife, for I had never seen her give respect to a sports personality in this manner.
After the banquet, and at times since then, and certainly again after his death June 3, my wife and I have talked about what it is in Ali that she hasn’t seen in other prominent sports figures.
We noted that he brought elegance to a brutal sport, and charm to boastfulness. We cited the twinkle in his eye that outlasted his diseased body.
We recalled the tolerance and dignity he brought to his faith, and how he demonstrated his faith commitment at the most inconvenient time in his career.
We recalled his poetry when he was young and talked too much, and his use of magic to communicate after disease stole his words, as he did that night we were with him.
Years after that banquet, when Ali lit the Olympic flame at the 1996 Olympics, my wife cried. She had tears in her eyes again when that moment was replayed on the day after Ali’s death.
Ali ascended to worldwide fame in a different era – when professional media tended to be enablers more than investigative journalists, and before social media pushed every personal weakness around the planet overnight. It’s possible Ali would not have been as loved if he had emerged in public life today. It’s also possible he would have been even more beloved.