Spring semester is finished at Hubbard State University and Marcus Harnack is standing on the sidewalk outside the Chicago O’Hare airport terminal building. He received straight “A’s” in all of his chemistry, science, and math classes, but it looks like he will probably get a “B” in psychology. He just hasn’t been able to concentrate on psychology, largely because it requires a lot of rote memorization of terms and concepts of which he has no interest. What does interest Marcus is Subani De Silva, whom he’s been dating since February.

Subani is from Sri Lanka, where her parents are both medical doctors. She is a chemistry/pre-med major, a bit shy, and is incredibly well spoken. Probably the only thing she has in common with other girls on the Hubbard campus is her religion; she is a Christian. Subani isn’t very high maintenance. On many evenings she and Marcus are satisfied to sit around the kitchen table in Marcus’ apartment and study! However, these two are very much in love with each other. There are times when they look into each other’s eyes and ponder the incredible odds that they, born half a world apart, could have ever met. When he was eight years old, sledding down the snowy hill in his back yard, she was riding through humidity and haze in an oil-belching auto rickshaw on the way to her catholic girl’s school. He rode his bicycle to school. Her rickshaw driver would park under a banyan tree and wait the entire school day for her, just in case she got ill or had to leave school early.

Marcus was a bit nervous when he first took Subani home to meet his parents for Sunday dinner early last March. He wasn’t quite sure how his middle class Caucasian parents would react to this beautiful brown-skinned girl. It took about one minute to break the ice, as Subani’s big smile and polite demeanor won them over in a flash. Even Marcus’ middle school brother Timmy was unusually taken aback by Subani. Once, when Marcus went into the kitchen to get some more gravy, Timmy followed him and confided that he thought Subani was really “cute.” Since that first Sunday dinner, Marcus and Subani have visited his folks at least twice a week. On a couple of occasions Subani has cooked for the family, whipping up some tasty curry dishes.

While Ralph, Betty, and Timmy Harnack have gotten to know Subani well, her Sri-Lankan parents are clueless about Marcus. She has not spoken to her parents about meeting and dating Marcus, largely because she fears their criticism. She is, after all, supposed to marry someone of high social and economic standing, preferably a medical doctor. If Marcus were to finish his bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering, they would view him as an educated man, but his educational and social standing would not measure up to their expectations for Subani.

It is a typical O’Hare day, the roaring noise of arriving and departing airplanes overhead. On this bright, sunny afternoon Marcus holds Subani in a close embrace counting down the seconds until she enters the building, shows her ticket, and heads back home to Colombo for the summer. He doesn’t know what he is going to do for three months in the absence of her soft voice and magnetic smile. While she’s happy to go home and see her family again, she is miserable knowing that she will not be with Marcus. She walks a tight line as she heads home for the summer. Her parents will probably introduce her to suitors, presumably Sri-Lankan born medical students, home from Universities in the United States or the United Kingdom. She will politely refuse their offers and try to explain to her parents that she has met a handsome gentleman in Hubbard, Wisconsin. They will tell her of the impracticality of marrying a Caucasian, but she won’t be listening as she recalls the snowy moonlight night when she and Marcus first made love.

It will be a moral victory for Subani if she can return to Hubbard in the fall with even the tacit permission of her parents to continue dating Marcus. They would probably disown her if they knew the degree of her emotional involvement with this handsome ex-foundry worker. One last kiss and she walks through security with her ticket. He waits until she has cleared the inspection and is putting her shoes on again. She gathers her belongings and looks back at him, a brave smile on her face as she prepares to return to a culture, the depths and complications of which Marcus can’t even imagine.

A terribly sick young man named Cho Seung-Hui slaughtered 32 people at Virginia Tech University this week before turning the gun on himself. This is a tragedy of immense proportions that will affect both the witnesses and the families of the dead and injured as long as they live. My thoughts and prayers go out to all who lost friends and children this week.

Unfortunately the Virginia Tech tragedy has become the latest soup de jour of the drive-by media. If the VA Tech spree shooting had occurred one week earlier, Don Imus would still be working at MSNBC. Rather than honoring the victims, the story of their unfortunate demise has now been used by the media to drive home wrong-handed political agendas and other false propositions.

False Proposition #1: Poor security at VA Tech was responsible for this tragedy. Wrong. Cho Seung-Hui is the only person responsible for this event. We live in an open society that values freedom of thought, movement, and expression. It is impossible to make a college campus secure from anyone with Seung-Hui’s intentions and determination. Any University that would put armed personnel and radar detectors at every door and stage a SWAT team in front of each campus building would soon go out of business either as the result of high security costs or a lack of student enrollment. The risk of being killed on a University campus is incredibly low and it must be undertaken if we are to remain a free people.

False Proposition #2: If gun control existed in the United States, like in Europe, this tragedy would never have happened. Wrong again. Bad guys will always get guns. While it is not desirable that everyone at VA Tech should carry a gun, if even one of the students or professors in the affected classrooms had the proper training, and a permit to carry, Hui’s rampage would have been cut short and lives would have been saved. Ironically, rather than protecting lives, the gun-free zone existing at VA Tech gave Mr. Hui a wide-open field of defenseless victims.

False Proposition #3: The United States of America is a sick and materialistic society, which breeds violence and spree killings. Give me a break! Spree killings are rare, but have regularly occurred throughout history in virtually all cultures. In 1938 a Japanese man named Mutsuo Toi used a rifle and swords to kill his grandmother and 29 neighbors. In 1982 Woo Bum-Kon killed 57 people in South Korea. On August 19, 1987 in Berkshire, England Michael Ryan armed with an AK-47 and a Beretta pistol, killed his mother and fifteen others before fatally shooting himself. His weapons were legally licensed. On November 13 and 14th in Aramoana, New Zealand, David Gray shot and killed 13 people before being killed by police. Yes, the US has had its share of spree killings, but they are not unique to our culture.

False Proposition #4: College students today face far more academic and economic pressure than their parents did, which increases their stress level and their propensity to engage in violence. This is an incredibly ridiculous presumption. College students today have an unprecedented standard of living that their parents couldn’t have even imagined. They have nice cars, fancy clothes, big screen televisions, I-pods, and cell phones. Believe me, they’re not deprived of material goods. Furthermore, the academic pressure faced by today’s college students is far less than the pressure faced by their parents. Compared to their parents, today’s college graduates have many more job opportunities upon graduation. The current generation of college students face far less academic pressure than their parents, largely due to the fact that many more professors engage in grade inflation than was the case a generation ago.

There is one proposition that may have some validity, that being if VA Tech administrators and police had locked down the campus and warned students immediately after the first shooting, thirty lives may have been saved in Norris Hall. After the first two victims were discovered in a dormitory, administrators and campus police concluded that the killer had probably left the campus, not to return. This turned out to be an incorrect and tragic assumption.

Of course, every cub reporter descending on Blacksburg is a crime expert who would have done it differently. Like all Monday morning quarterbacks these reporters and critics of the VA Tech administration have 20-20 hindsight. I’ve got news for all of these reporters; when someone with a 9-mm glock revolver and plenty of ammunition comes into your University and starts shooting, you do the best you can, under extreme pressure, with the facts at hand. Unfortunately, within a few weeks, I’ll lay odds that VA Tech President Charles Steger will be forced to resign. The media and other critics of the VA Tech administration will insist that someone’s head must roll and Steger will be the scapegoat. Everyone will feel better knowing that someone has been “punished” for Hui’s crime, but Steger is not to blame. Cho Seung-Hui is the only one who deserves to be punished for this crime, and he is gone for eternity.

As an occasional viewer of MSNBC’s live broadcast of Don Imus’ New York morning drive CBS radio show, I wasn’t surprised that he would refer to the Rutgers girls basketball team as “rough girls with tattoos” and “nappy headed hos”. This is standard fare for the old shock jock that routinely insults women, Jews, blacks, whites, fat people, the President, politicians, his boss at CBS radio, and anyone else who comes to mind. Imus makes hurtful, cutting comments. That’s his stock in trade. It gets him ratings. MSNBC and CBS make a lot of money from the advertisers who sponsor his show.

I used to watch Imus for a few minutes nearly every day while shoveling down a bowl of cereal, but I’ve gotten sick of him; not because of his political incorrectness, but because of his incessant babbling about his wife’s non-toxic cleaning products and his constant complaints about his health. As I’m growing older the last thing I want to see in the morning is a physically deteriorating old white guy clearing his throat and talking about his next doctor’s appointment.

I didn’t see Imus on the day he made his comments, but after watching the tape of his remarks on Youtube, I came to the conclusion that neither the tone nor the words of Imus’ comments were out of the ordinary for the old guy. Of course, seeing a slight spark in the brush, the Vicars of Victimhood, Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton jumped into action, fanning that spark into a media-driven flame that would draw comment far and wide. At a press conference called to condemn Imus, Rutgers Coach Vivian Springer took advantage of free publicity time, spending thirty minutes describing the excellent season her players had enjoyed. Of course, the implication was that the season didn’t matter any more because of five words uttered by some over the hill guy in New York. In a quote that must have made Jesse Jackson’s chest swell with joy, Rutgers junior guard Matee Ajavon said, of Imus’ remarks, “This has scarred me for life.”

Give me a break, Matee. If the ladies of the Rutgers basketball team are as talented, intelligent, gifted, and resilient as your coach insists, and I don’t doubt that this is the case, none of you should have any problem overcoming the remarks of an aging old fart in New York City. Imus insults hundreds of people every year on his radio show. Most ignore his remarks. In the case of the Rutgers basketball team, an apology would have been sufficient. Indeed, Imus made the apology and agreed to meet with the team.

If anyone has it right concerning this whole Rutgers incident it is Jason Whitlock, a columnist with the Kansas City Star. You can view his entire remarks at:

http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html

In the April 11, 2007 edition of the Kansas City Star Whitlock writes:

“Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem. In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive? I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.”

Don Imus’ comments were stupid but they weren’t any worse than anything he would normally say on a typical day. In my opinion he didn’t deserve to get canned by MSNBC. Despite MSNBC’s high-minded moral reasons for discontinuing the Imus show, they didn’t step up to the plate until a week after the incident when most of the advertising money dried up. When the money went away, MSNBC got religion.

Imus has made plenty of money. In his youth he abused his body with cocaine and alcohol, leading to many of his current health problems. It might be more physically and spiritually advantageous for him to retire from radio and work with child cancer patients at his ranch in New Mexico. It really doesn’t matter much whether Don Imus stays on the radio or not. What does matter is that black leaders reject the entire concept of “victimization” and start preaching and insisting that their progeny get serious about education and personal responsibility. Opportunities need to be made available for all American young people to succeed, but this means nothing if leaders in the black community continue to legitimize the mindset of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

In the spirit of religious harmony, Iranian President Ahmadinejad released fifteen British soldiers as an “Easter Gift to the British People.” Within hours after the release, thanks to an Iranian-made roadside bomb, four British soldiers, two of them women, died near Basra.

The Iranians have demonstrated their “military might” by overwhelming two unprotected pontoon boats and holding their occupants hostage. During the ordeal, the fifteen British soldiers were blindfolded, hands bound, against a wall. As the Iranians cocked their weapons behind their backs, one of the soldiers vomited, leading the others to suspect his throat had been cut. According to British crewman Simon Massey, “It was just crazy, we were sat there with our heads up against the wall, still blindfolded and handcuffed, and I just thought, that was it, that was going to be it for the 15 of us.”

The thirteen days between capture and release were humiliating for the British, as their soldiers admitted to trespass in Iranian waters and thanked Ahmadinejad for his gracious treatment and forgiveness. As they left for home the British were given gifts of CDs, vases, pistachio nuts, and Persian sweets. The entire incident did two things for Iran. First, it emphasized the lack of resolve of the British and the Americans to do anything about Iranian aggression. Second, a dangerous prisoner, Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat and member of the insurgent Quds, was released by US and Iraqi forces as part of the deal. This will play well in the Arab press.

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who never minces words, described the whole affair as “a low-cost experiment for them [Iran] designed to see how tough a response they would get from Britain, Europe and, ultimately, the United States. The answer is ‘not much’. According to Bolton, “It will embolden them [Iran] to press ahead on the nuclear weapons front.”

During the cold war with the Soviet Union the phrase “aggressive containment” was coined. The United States, now governed by “soft” Democrats, could now use the same term to describe its relationship with Islamic fascists around the world. With Nancy Pelosi dancing with the Syrians in Damascus and Democrats in Congress signaling to all Islamic fascists that there is little appetite for further engagement in Iraq, it is no wonder that the Iranians feel energized. Ironically, polls indicate that the people in the Middle East who remain the most positive and supportive of the United States are the citizens of Iran, who are out of step with their leaders in this regard. Generally well-educated and freedom-loving, Iranian citizens understand the tyranny of their religious state. In Dubai the US has a diplomatic outpost to reach dissident Iranians and there is unquestionably aid money flowing from the United States to Iranians unhappy with Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad stands proudly proclaiming victory while he is alienating the world community, dissidents in his own country are being financed, and the Israeli’s have their weapons cocked and ready to destroy his nuclear weapons capability before he can destroy Israel. Just as George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” four years ago, Ahmadinejad declares it today. We’ll see who gets the last laugh.

As we go about our daily lives we see and hear a lot of things that are just plain stupid! At the risk of being cynical, over the past week I’ve jotted a few of them down. Remember, these are my personal opinions, no more, no less.

Stupid Slogan: The prominent law firm of Robins, Kaplin, Miller, and Cirisi, LLP has a registered trademark for its slogan, “We don’t just practice law, we make history.” They cite several major victories on behalf of their clients, including large settlements against Microsoft and tobacco companies, the Bhopal India suit against Union Carbide, and the Dalcon Shield case. These are big cases, for sure, but several large law firms can lay claim to multi-million dollar settlements on behalf of their clients. My point is, they’re darned good lawyers, but it may be an overstatement on their part to say they’re “making history.” I’m not sure I want my lawyer to make history. I think I’ll just settle for one who can handle my legal needs. On second thought, if RKMC, LLP really wants to make history, maybe they can settle the middle-east crisis!

Stupid Bumper Sticker: The other day I saw a bumper sticker that showed a motorcycle next to a car. The sticker read, “Motorcycles Have Equal Rights”. This sticker is stupid for two reasons. First, a motorcycle is an inanimate object and I wasn’t aware that inanimate objects have rights. I don’t think my frying pan has rights and I’m pretty sure my pipe wrench doesn’t have rights. Second, if you’re riding a motorcycle and you have the “right of way” at an intersection and a 4,000 pound Buick decides to go first, I’d suggest that you not “insist” on your legal rights but to instead wait for the Buick. Your “rights” don’t mean much if you collide with the Buick. The lesson: when life and death are concerned, never put your rights ahead of anything bigger or faster than you!

Stupid Answer: The other day I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio (one of my most fertile sources of stupid stuff) while they were interviewing Tom Dooher, the new president of the labor union that represents Minnesota public school teachers. The Teacher’s Union, which used to be called the Minnesota Education Association (MEA), now calls itself “Education Minnesota”. I’m sure that Tom Dooher is a nice guy. I’d probably get along great with him if he were my next-door neighbor. Like other teachers who labor in Minnesota’s government schools, as long as class sizes are low enough and pay and benefits are high enough, he probably does like kids. However, when asked by MPR’s Cathy Wurzer why he chose to run for the office of President of the teacher’s union (Education Minnesota), the first words out of his mouth were: “My grandfather was a teamster and he was murdered in his own back yard.” Good start, Tom. It’s all about kids!

Stupid Sign: People from other states have to wonder what the heck is going on in Minnesota when they walk into businesses and public buildings and see signs like, “The Minnesota Twins Baseball Club Bans Guns in these Premises,” or “Historic Theatre Group Bans Buns in these Premises”. These signs are the result of some verbiage in the Minnesota Carry Permit Law. When they see the signs, folks who are legally carrying guns will be reminded to put them in the glove compartment before they enter these posted establishments. Of course, those who are carrying guns illegally and have intention to do harm won’t pay attention to the sign anyway! Murder, robbery and rape are also illegal on these premises, but we don’t need a sign to tell us. These Minnesota gun signs are not only stupid, but they make me feel a bit unsafe. I’d feel a lot more secure if I saw a sign on the door that said; ”Inside this Premises we’re all packing heat!”

Stupid Idea: Many of the same folks in Congress that are calling attention to the disgraceful state of Walter Reed Army Hospital and other federal medical centers serving our Veterans want the Government to run our entire health care system. Face it; the Federal Government screws up almost everything it touches. To put the health care system in the hands of the Federal government is a very bad idea. If we want to “fix” health care we need to de-regulate much of the medical establishment and institute caps on medical malpractice claims. That’s another blog for another day.

Stupid Vote: Almost all politics is stupid, but the latest vote by the both House and Senate to put a deadline on US involvement in Iraq borders not only on stupidity but perhaps treason. Our troops in the field are sick of politicians saying that they support them but don’t support their mission. In my opinion when our soldiers are in harms way efforts to micromanage the war in Congress not only embolden the enemy, they also demoralize our young men and women serving in Iraq. With politicians, “political points” matter most, unfortunately even more than the lives of our brave young soldiers.

Well, folks, it’s off to another week. Get our your note pads! If there is something that you think is incredibly stupid, just post your comment on this blog. One thing is for certain; stupidity seems to be the only commodity for which there is an endless supply!