Rah, rah, rah

If you were appalled at the cavalier cops, here’s another story to make you sneer with disgust. Jaquandor reports on a couple of kids who pulled a stupid prank that nearly killed a couple of teenagers (one had a broken neck and brain damage, and has been through 10 surgeries), and the judge gave them a couple of light sentences, and worst of all, delayed the start of their sentences…until the end of football season.

That’s right, they’re high school football players. It would be unduly harsh to prevent them from playing football, you know. And besides, the members of the football team must all be good kids. Regular saints.

I remember the football team in my high school—Kent-Meridian was big on football. I was in gym class with them. If we’d ever picked teams for our games, I would have been one of those picked nearly last; I was the skinny nerd who would have rather been anywhere else. We never picked teams, though, because the coach always divided the class into the football players vs. everyone else. So one day we’re playing basketball—if you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s not a contact sport—when I go to make a jump shot and a 250 pound lineman takes me out with a tackle from the side. I briefly recall seeing them high-five each other before the pain blinded me: I’m really not used to having my patella on the medial side of my leg, or to having my knee bend sideways. My assailant was not rebuked, nor did I get so much as an apology from him.

I do not have a charitable view of the kind of privilege given to participants in team sports.

Oh, well. The football players who crippled another student in Kenton, Ohio are suffering horribly.

The 17-year-old’s father, C.J. Howard, said members of the community have made crude remarks when his family shops at a nearby Wal-Mart store and that his younger children are taunted by older youth when they play in the yard.

Oh, wow, man. They’re getting called mean names. By comparison, the kids who were nearly killed got off easy.

Is incompetence an act of God?

An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we’ve come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place.

“Thank God nobody was hurt,” Pastor Jeff Carroll said. “He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there.”

This story has an additional twist, though. Why did the church collapse?

The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a homebuilder, said he was not aware of any requirements and remains unconvinced a government body should have a say in how a church is built. “If the state and the church are separate, I don’t understand why they think they’ve got jurisdiction,” he said.

It seems to me that houses built on faith lack any substantial means of support, as this little story illustrates. I’m a little bit sympathetic with Pastor Carroll’s position, though: let’s remove churches from all secular oversight and impose no demands or restrictions on their construction, except that in the spirit of fair warning we should require large signs be posted all around them, announcing the hazard but reassuring congregants that god himself is holding the building up. That’ll drive everyone with a lick of sense away from them, and those consenting adults (we’ll have a new reason to forbid the attendance of children!) who believe in ghosts propping up the bricks…well, they’ll be removed from the population one way or another.

I wonder if any insurance companies in Alabama have been alerted to the construction standards of Jeff Carroll homes?