---Oh, just say no to

---Oh, just say no to mediocrity, eh?

This is such bullshit. I simply cannot believe the absolute arrogance of the Nebraska AD.

"We will not surrender the Big 12 Conference to Oklahoma and Texas."
Umm, I hate to tell you this, Mr. Pederson, but Oklahoma and Texas had
crappy teams for years. They worked their way out of the hole they had
fallen into by hard work and sticking by the coaches they had hired.
This was not a coup d’etat, like you seem to think. Nebraska was not
illegally deposed from their righteous throne by a black ops. There
weren’t any SEAL’s crab crawling through Big 12 Headquarters by the
dark of night, hacking into computers, stacking the deck against you.
The conference expanded. Other schools in said conference worked hard
and became better. To put it in Kissinger terminology: the Big 12
Conference became a multilateral threat and challenged your hegemony.
But then again, you’re just an AD, so I’ll put it in terms you do
understand: the playing field was leveled and you don’t like it very
much, do you?
Here’s my advice to you, Mr. Pederson: rehire Solich and quit your
bitching. I daresay the next time you win a National Championship, the
press will say Nebraska actually deserved
it. Now, I’m originally from Nebraska. Born and raised in Omaha. I am
well acquainted with the mythic proportions of Husker football: it’s
a big deal there. People who live elsewhere in the country have a hard
time understanding just what the deal is with the football worship.
When they visit Omaha, or any other part of Nebraska, strangers gape at
the bright red NU flags that are unfurled every autumn Saturday. They
read the newspapers and don’t quite understand why they can’t find
the score of the game they wanted to know about because the sports page
is jam packed with arcane Husker football facts. I pity the poor souls
who find themselves driving I-80 between Omaha and Lincoln on a
Saturday morning; the poor souls who are undoubtedly wondering what the
hell is happening in Lincoln that results in all of this insane
traffic. It simply has to be a confusing situation for people who are
not from Nebraska, like an inside joke that goes right over your head
and leaves you doubting your intelligence. But, if you’re from
Nebraska, well, you’re one of three million people who get
the inside joke. You grow up with Huskers. You listen to the games on
the radio and you know who Kent Pavelka is. You know who Johnny
Rodgers, Mike Rozier, and Turner Gill are. You know that Osborne would always
rush on first down. You know that Bob Devaney could have given Michael
Corleone a run for his money in the will power department. You know
that when a game was on TV, there would be no traffic on the streets,
causing Omaha look like a ghost town, the odd bit of newspaper blowing
across the five lanes of Dodge Street unhindered by passing cars. You
know that Memorial Stadium in Lincoln is the third most populated place
in the state on football Saturdays. You know all sorts of
trivia that you would never know about if you didn’t live in
Nebraska. There’s a reason for this adulation: it’s simply because
there’s no other show in town. Sure, Creighton is located in Omaha,
but they don’t have a football team, unless you count this one.
http://www.weirdharold.com/creighton.htm . The University of
Nebraska-Omaha does
have a football team, but hey, they’re only Division II-A---or
something like that. I don’t think anyone actually knows what
division they play in or cares. UNL, however, does possess a Division I
athletic program, and that’s an accomplishment on two fronts: first,
they have a good team to root for; and, second, that collegiate
accomplishment makes the rest of the state important. They’re
contenders now. They’re in the same league with the big boys. Now,
it’s true. Nebraskans do have an inferiority complex.
It’s completely natural. Nebraska is a good place to live, but the
rest of the world sees it as Hickville, USA. When I chat with Europeans
and they ask me where I’m originally from and I say Omaha,
invariably, their reply is, “Where is that?” I tell them to pull
out a map of the USA, to look right in the middle of the country, and
then they’ll see it. Then the recognition hits them. “Oh, that’s the place in the Counting Crows song, right?”
Yep. Get your money back at the door. In my experience, you’ve got
two types of Nebraskans: the ones for whom the place is home and
they’re happy with it, and the ones who simply cannot wait until they
can bolt like a rabbit from the borders. I was one of the latter. But I
have a fond appreciation for the place, now, fifteen years after I left
for good because my folks and some siblings still live there. I make it
back once or twice a year and it’s grown on me. The things I took for
granted while I was growing up, like the complete lack of smog, the
ability for kids to still play outside without having to worry about
someone snatching them, have endeared the place to me on a whole new,
adult, level. If you can forgo 24/7 Chinese takeout and serious
culture, it’s not a bad place to be. Not like I’m ever moving back, but I can understand now
why some people choose to live there. When I was eighteen, it didn’t
seem to me like a place anyone should ever want to live. Ironically,
however, when I was younger and freshly liberated, I actually felt the
need to defend the place whenever someone slagged off on
Nebraska---either the place or the football team, because, for better
or worse, the football team is intertwined with the state; you really
can’t talk about one without mentioning the other. Now, I still
don’t know why I did this---or do it still. Sentimentality, I
suppose. But it was always interesting to listen to someone who was not
from the Nebraska fan club talk about the football team; they always
enlightened me. So, this I suppose, is the reason I’m cheesed that
the AD fired Solich: it shows a complete lack of perspective on the
whole issue of Nebraska football. It’s the only game in town, and by
God, it had better be a winning game. I have a hard time abiding the
whole win-at-any-price mentality that’s enveloped the Nebraska
football program and its fans. This was not the case when I was growing
up. Nebraska, back then, was the underdog; Oklahoma was forever beating
the snot out of us. It was always the big hope that Osborne would finally
get his National Championship, because he honestly deserved it. He’d
built up a solid program; one that kids clamored to play for. Osborne
worked under the assumption that someday they would win the National
Championship because excellence took time to establish and would
eventually be rewarded. And he was right. It worked. It was a sweet
moment when Nebraska beat Miami in the 1995 Orange Bowl to take the
Championship because it was well deserved. But this is also when it
went to pot. Because not only had the fans gotten their National
Championship, now they wanted more championships, to prove, once and for all how great Nebraska, the football team and the state itself, were.

They got greedy, in other words. They wanted more.
Osborne, a man whom I had always felt was a decent person, even got
caught up in it and allowed Lawrence Phillips, a convicted felon, to
play when Osborne would have normally kicked the guy off the team. That
desire to win; to please the fans; to bring money into the program and
into the school got him. It’s fairly obvious to me, at least, that
Frank Solich never had a fair shot at this job. Working under the
looming cloud of a legend had to be hard, but he did his best and while
last year was horrible, it was also rock bottom. They came back this
year. They improved. The rest of the world would call that progress,
but not the AD at UNL. To him, that’s mediocrity.
Bullshit. Root for a losing football team, like my alma mater’s (Iowa
State) and you’ll know frustration intimately. It’s more fun,
though, because your team can only go up. You will scream like mad when
they actually score, and it’s even better when they actually win.
Trust me on this one. Nebraska fans don’t know what losing
really is. When your worst season ever is a split, that ain’t losing;
that’s called Even Steven. They’re taking all the fun out of
rooting for their team. If your team is so good, and you’re forever
worried about them being knocked off the pedestal and the damage that
action will do, how can you possibly have any fun? When will it ever
be a celebration that your team won? And this is the honest truth with
Nebraska fans. After a victory, there’s always a collective sigh of
relief that envelops the whole state; everyone’s pleased that they simply didn’t screw it up.
And I ask you: where’s the fun in that? Because football is supposed
to be fun, right? Rooting for your team is supposed to be fun, correct?
Even bitching about the losses is supposed to be fun. But not for
Nebraska fans: it’s the potential end of the world. They have very
little perspective on the whole matter.
Nebraska football isn’t fun. I’m sorry and I’m sure I’ve just
pissed off half of my family with this little diatribe, but it’s the
truth. What’s sad is that it used to be fun and it isn’t anymore.

Sigh.

--- This
certainly isn’t good news. It seems that even with Charles Taylor in
exile that the powderkeg that is West Africa is on the verge of
exploding again. Not good. Not good, at all.
--- Today is World AIDS Day. People newly infected with HIV in 2002: 5
million AIDS deaths in 2002: 3 million...that's over 8,000 deaths per
day Estimated number of people living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2002:
42 million Total of AIDS deaths at the end of 2002: 28.1 million Total
number of AIDS orphans: 13.2 million If current world population
numbers are even remotely correct and we actually have six billion
people currently residing on this planet, .7% of the entire population
is currently living with this disease. Now, thanks to wonders of modern
statistics, that might not seem like a whole heck of a lot of people.
This is a limited view, yet it’s understandable why some people
couldn’t care less about it. Depending upon your geographical,
religious, and socio-economic status, it’s completely conceivable you
may never know a person who is infected in your lifetime. It’s not in my backyard and only perverts get it anyway, so why should I care?
Let me enlighten you as to why HIV/AIDS is the plague of our time and
why we need to do everything in our power to stop it. But not in a
scientific way. The facts are out there: go and look them up. I’m
talking about the way this virus affects us as human beings. This is
the one disease, more than TB, Polio, or Smallpox, that has the ability
to bring down the whole house of cards our world is built upon, mainly
because it plays upon civilization’s eternal weakness---vanity.
Neither TB nor Polio plays on upon vanity; because of the way they
spread, it’s conceivable that a rich person (particularly one who is
stupid enough not to be vaccinated for these diseases because they
think it will weaken their entire immune system in the process) will
catch them just as easily as a poor one. But HIV/AIDS is different. It
feeds upon our weaknesses as human beings not only in the way it
spreads, but in the ignorance it engenders in people who are unaffected
by it. We couldn’t possibly be touched by this now.
We’ve learned our lessons. We’ve learned how to have safe sex. It
can’t touch us now because we’ve learned how to take precautions.
It’s vanity, which is one of the seven deadly sins, if I remember
correctly.
But sins aside, the reality of the situation is deadly. It’s been
said by those far more educated in this area than I that in fifty
years, HIV/AIDS will be the leading factor in wiping out half the
population of the most heavily populated continent---Africa. Think
about that for a minute: let those numbers sink into your gray matter. Then
think about the warfare and the malnutrition endemic to that continent
which makes the situation even more desperate. Misery ad infinitum. Do
the people of Africa deserve this misery simply because they couldn’t
keep their pants zipped, as some have claimed is the real reason for
this plague? I would say no. To my mind, it’s so much about how the
problem started, as how we solve it. We’ve hit the stage, in other
words, that if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of
the problem. It’s really quite that simple. Pity for your fellow man
is a requisite of life on this Earth. If you don’t have it, well,
you’re lacking something really rather important, aren’t you? Do
something about it. If for no other reason than plagues have a horrible
way of spreading. Particularly plagues that play on vanity. --- Go and
read the husband today. He’s been doing that horrible thinking thing he has a tendency to do again.

Posted by Kathy at December 1, 2003 03:14 PM | TrackBack