My problems today are first-world problems. My house is warm and has reliable lucky-shucky and running hot water and The Blue and Only Toilet and its friends. There are two late-model vee-hickles in the driveway. I cannot tell you how many computing devices we own at this point. Tre-guuuuuurrrrtha!

Still, I was out of sorts today. All day. It isn’t only that I am still coughing out the cold virus that hit me last week, although that was annoying. And yes, I am fine. I had a wonderful 3-mile walk this morning and I returned from that greatly exhilarated..

Sigh. Football players and rape. Again. Yes, Steubenville. Y’know, why is it that we (as a society, I mean) continue to elevate children (yes, children) who happen to be good at an athletic sport into the realm of heroes?

When I was a little kid, I really wanted to be a popular high school girl, homecoming queen and dating the quarterback or whoever. I never did that. I was never that “cool”. By the time I was actually *in* high school, I kind of didn’t cared. I had Bad Boyfriend (a cross-country runner) and then, in junior year, I started to date a college freshman who had graduated from my high school two years ahead of me. He was a great boyfriend although we ultimately broke up. Still, I was really not homecoming queen material…

In the last few years, I have reconnected with some of my high school class including a few people who were on the football team. What do I remember about those old football players? When we did the musical play “Hello Dolly” and some of these guys were recruited as waiters. I played flute and piccolo (and most of the violin parts — on my flute, don’t ask) in the pit and every time those football player / waiters galumphed across the stage with their rubber chickens and stuff we all laughed like crazy. I am sure that none of those particular football players have ever raped anyone. They are wonderful guys. I am glad to be friends with them now and so sorry that I didn’t get to know them better back in the day.

The thing is that I understand the culture of a small town and how important sports can be. Football games in my town were fun and exciting (even though I didn’t really know what was going on). But rape is never okay. I saw a few of the original Steubenville videos and I was amazed that these kids would actually think it was okay to put them out on social media. Say what? You are video-ing what? What the hell are you doing? What were these kids thinking? Where were all the parents?

I may not have always been the best parent but I will doubt that anything resembling a rape ever happened here in The Landfill. I’m not sure what I did but apparently it’s not all that hard to raise daughters who have enough self esteem to be uninterested in the attention of some popular football player.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 18th, 2013 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.