Sitting on My Porch Part Eighty Two

I’m not ready to talk football yet but I am glad Drew Brees got his contract signed. I still don’t think this season is going to be that good because the coach is suspended but we’ll at least have a punchers chance. I knew Drew wasn’t going to give the Saints a discount because he owes it to the other players at his position to keep the market rate going up. Peyton Manning set the scale for Drew’s contract and he just set the scale for Aaron Rodgers. With teams giving out this kind of money to quarterbacks there’s no way they are going to let anyone hit them hard enough for injury. Whatever the record is for roughing the passer penalties the 2012 season will shatter it.

I’m going out of town for a few days. Despite the humidity, random thunderstorms and the chance of getting shot on a public bus I don’t really like leaving the city. I guess it’s always good to get away for a few days and see something different. I was going to mention in this paragraph how the site of a shrimper selling fresh shrimp out of his truck in Gentilly today was heartwarming but I don’t want to sound like a BP commercial. I hope the hotel I’m staying in has Cartoon Network. If not I am going to miss the premier of Black Dynamite Sunday night. 

I went to a healthcare forum sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women on Wednesday night. There was a lot of talk about the healthcare act. I learned a lot about it that I really didn’t know before. It actually made me feel more positive about it. There were other people in the audience that had the same question I did. How come know one seems to know about all these good things? The media spent so much time quoting politicians and so little time explaining the bill that I can’t be mad if a lot of Americans are not as informed as they should be.

Some people are upset with Mitt Romney about using the NAACP to gain favor with his base. I am sure he went there to be booed as loudly as possible. Later that night he made a speech in Montana and used a quote about people wanting “free stuff” that he used before in speaking about other groups.  This allowed him and his supporters to pull out old quotes and dismiss the racial intentions of what he said while triggering racial tension at the same time. It was a shrewd political move. Very few things are out of bonds when you are running for office these days so I am not upset with Mitt Romney. I’m upset with the crowd at the NAACP. Have they been paying attention to the last four years? What did they think he was there to do? The best way to respond to his words about the healthcare bill was to not do or say anything at all. They should have just sat there like a bunch of zombies and left the used car salesman to come up with a way to save face.

Life can be challenging as you navigate it. At the end of the day everyone is just a combination of good and bad choices. In most cases death has a way of taking the edge of off the bad choices we’ve made. A lot of people who did things that weren’t so good get a break when they die. Death shakes humans to the core so much that I think we talk ourselves into making people’s actions not as bad as they actually were. I’ve been trying to think if there’s anyone who’s had their legacy changed from one extreme to the other like Joe Paterno. At this time a year ago Joe Paterno was considered a symbol of integrity and good values. In all the years of following college football I never heard anyone say anything negative about him at all. Now he’s passed away, a report funded by his own college said he protected a child molester for years and people are removing his name from buildings that were dedicated to him. It’s unbelievable. It’s the kind of thing that makes you question everybody.

It's risky for society to build people up sometimes. No human is above doing something wrong and we probably shouldn't hold anyone to that standard. At the same time I don't think we want to get to the point where we have no hope in people at all. If no one has help in society then the world just becomes one big ghetto and no one wants to live like that.