Honor and 'Deflategate'

Many colleges and universities here in my native Virginia have codes of honor, most dating back many years and shining with that special patina of respect we in the Old Dominion reserve for the best of our traditions.

Absolute understanding of and respect for the Honor Code at my school was the first priority of freshman orientation in my day. So perhaps you can appreciate my astonishment about half-way through my first semester to awaken one morning to the news that several uppclassmen were no longer with us. They had been present the day before. And now they were not.

Well into the night before, the student-run Honor Council had found them guilty of honors violations. And now they were gone. I had known two of them for years. They had been like big brothers to me. I was very sad for them.

But it made the concept of honor very real to me.

And today in the world around us that same concept seems under siege.

Lying, cheating, and stealing seem to have slithered into many of our institutions, both at home and abroad.  

I first started thinking about this several years ago when I read Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, a devastatingly honest book about the criminal behavior at that once-paragon of American business – Enron. How else could that have happened without a certain sense of permissiveness, a sort-of winking, nodding, and foot-shuffling among people who deep down inside probably knew better?

And this morning when I picked up my newspaper I saw a Page One story that felt like a little foot-shuffling going on in an unlikely venue.

“Tech to give its athletes stipend for attendance,” the lead headline read.

Right way an alarm went off…and it got louder by the time I got to the Sports Pages where I learned that other prominent state institutions of higher learning were thinking about the same thing.

The alarm sounded this way to me: the professionalizing of big-time college athletics has let the camel’s snout get under the tent flap.

College athletics are incubators for the talent driving professional sports. And things have gotten awfully cozy over the years. This stipend business seems to bring the noose full circle. And since when are those stipends fair when we consider the great majority of students who will be denied comparable goodies?

It’s alarming too because money brings compromise, temptation, and worse to an aspect of higher education that’s shown its bad side many times. Anybody notice what’s been going on at UNC recently?

And if you’re a taxpayer, you need to understand that the Tech program alone referred to in the Times-Dispatch story (which you can read by link here) is going to cost $900,000. Where do you think that’s going to come from?

I think it’s high time we drew a line in the sand and sent the camel packing. Because with the  professionalizing of big-time college athletics, can the supercilious mummery of “Deflategate” be far behind?

(Click here to read about "Deflategate.")

Contrasts

In the news…

LBJ gets short shrift in the new movie, Selma.

Why am I not surprised?

The headline says: “Hollywood takes history into its own hands.” The review is an op-ed piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch the other day. You can read it here. But the gist of it is that the president who “did more to bring about social equality than any President since Lincoln … had feet of clay;” and the real work of Selma’s legacy was done without the sitting President’s help.

Hmmm. I always think of Dr. Martin Luther King front and center facing off with frowning white guys with weapons. So where was LBJ?

Maybe the truth is in an attendant editorial cartoon showing a couple looking at a poster for Selma, the flick, with a caption reading: “It’s the original ‘I can’t breathe’.”

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Meanwhile, elsewhere in the news we learn that in Richmond homeless folk are to be barred from under a new bridge by a $53,000 chunk out of the taxpayers’ hides for a high-tech fence. 

And the bridge is not that big.

But to hear the comments of various poohbahs interviewed for the story by the ‘paper, the tone is as if the homeless do not exist You may read the whole thing for yourself here.

What’s really going on is painfully evident to we the peeps – our “leaders” are dancing on the heads of pins while they are nowhere close to being angels.

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So are Richmond’s homeless just as invisible as the shades of the poor slaves who suffered mightily and were buried on or near a plot other poohbahs want for a baseball park?

And it’s a baseball park that some say will never attract the fans that have turned out for the sport since my grandfather’s generation – Mooer’s Field, which was followed by Parker Field, and now The Diamond – all in the same general area just off an Interstate highway.

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Meanwhile, your humble scrivener was rescued from all that folderol’s angst while “Adjudicating” at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School Literary Arts division where his faith in humankind’s ability to deal with the world thrived surrounded by grace, humor, and budding  literary talent.

I speak, of course, of the several dozen eighth graders  from throughout the counties, cities, and towns of Central Virginia in the admission’s process for one of the region’s best secondary schools.

Absent was the denial, posturing, and all-too-transparent façade of adults leading the charge for a fence to keep homeless people from their age-old custom of sleeping under bridges…

I was like – if not THERE, then WHERE? Fifty-three large would make a pretty good down-payment on a homeless shelter, but a fence? Come on.

… and the ducking, bobbing and weaving of poohbahs defending the indefensible – suburbanites’ hootin’, hollerin’, and drinking gallons of celebratory milkshake cups of beer in a place that should be preserved, protected, and reverenced as a place of remembrance for what some would rather forget.

Child's Play?

Over several years during the 1990’s, I participated in a half dozen short-term missions, including four to the  Mexican city of Reynosa.

Located along the Rio Bravo (which is called the Rio Grande in the U.S.) opposite McAllen, Texas, Reynosa by then had become a magnet for people migrating from the country’s interior seeking better lives.To accommodate the influx of thousands, the government made available large tracts of bare, semi-arid abandoned land for the migrants. The tracts became shanty towns.

It was in one of those – home to some 25,000 people living without any utilities including running water – that our mission work centered.

We did what we could – working with local church partners that our sponsoring organization had arranged. The work was typical -- building, teaching, working with children and on two occasions providing medical and dental clinics, all the while working in high heat and humidity along an inhospitable  landscape of constant dust, scraggly desert plants and the occasional rattlesnake. It was bleak, but the people were not. They were uplifting to be with, their faith instructive and palpable even in the face of daunting circumstances. The children particularly were bright and lively, and they were learning English in their schools. So to practice with Norteamericanos, was a real treat.

For us, the work was challenging but enlightening. If you had not thought of poverty in an absolute way, here it was. The real deal.  Pretty unnerving – nearly unbelievable – to those new to our trips.

So as welcome respite, on a couple of evenings we would visit a Christian orphanage in Reynosa. It centered on a traditionally styled three-story baronial home surrounded by ancient cooling trees and plenty of room for  outside recreation for the dozens of children who were there.

They enjoyed having us play soccer or simply encourage them on their swings and see-saws. Meanwhile some tended to gravitate to individuals among us, and that’s how I met a little girl named Erika. Somehow she had learned that I might be able to help her with her English, and I readily agreed. She was about 10 and a very bright and happy child. Erika quickly invented a way to learn the names of each person in our group. She had one of those tablets with a film covering a treated flat background. Using a stylus, she could write or draw on the film and the image would appear. When you pulled the film up, the images disappeared and she could start over. So Erika and I walked around, and I introduced her to each of the 15 members of our group, while she wrote their names on her tablet. When we were finished, she read them to me and pointed out each person. Pretty good for a 10-year-old, I thought.

          On the following night, Erika was excited to show me something, she said. Without the list, she led me around and greeted each of the 15 members of our group…by name. It was a remarkable demonstration.

Later, once the children had gone upstairs to get ready to sleep, three of us gathered for coffee in the cool of the evening under the trees’ canopy.

Our hostess was Elena, a local contact for our trips. She and I had become acquainted through working together on prior missions. We communicated in a working combination of English and Spanish which we called Spanglish…It worked.

 “I want to tell you a story,” Elena said to me that last night.

She recalled a time several years earlier when the city police brought an infant to the orphanage. The baby had been traumatized somehow, and did not speak or smile or make eye contact, Elena said. She just ate sparsely and slept. So Elena and a friend of hers agreed to pray twice a day with the baby. Days became weeks. And still the child did not respond. Doctors even said she might not ever. But Elena and her friend did not give up. They knew better …  and kept praying and holding and loving the little one, believing that God would heal her.

The day finally came when the baby girl made eye contact and smiled at the women. The child  began to get well, to come back to herself.

As I listened, I wondered where all this was going. And just then Elena said she had noticed what my bright little friend Erika was doing and how happy she was. 

Still I did not see the clues. But what Elena said next opened my eyes:

“La niñita … esta aqui …. Tu estudiante. Tu amiga nueva … She is Erika.”

I returned to work the next morning with a spring in my step – the heat and humidity irrelevant – realizing that I had just helped a 10-year-old miracle with her English.