AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH?

Here I go again, spewing some thoughts out there.

Recently, in an after-game interview, Pat Knight, son of the famous Bobby Knight, who once threw a chair across the basketball court in a fit of anger, seems to have some of his Dad’s temperament when it comes to coaching.

It seems after a particularly ugly loss by his Lamar team to Stephen F. Austin 62-52, he said:

"We've got the worst group of seniors right now that I've ever been associated with. Their mentality is awful. Their attitude is awful. It has been their M.O. for the last three years.

We've had problems with them off the court, on the court, classroom, drugs, being late for stuff. All that stuff correlates together if you're going to win games. You just can't do all that B.S. and expect to win games. And if people have a problem with me being harsh about it, I don't care. I came here to clean something up."

It’s not that I disagree with the coach: I think he did the right thing in exposing the players. My problem is with his critics, who think he was too harsh, that the coach should maybe limit their playing time or bench them. Why do we accept the aberrant behavior and go back to coddling these misfits? Why not expose it for what it is?

If these guys who are considered men in college can do these kinds of things, in a public venue, affecting those who put trust in them, who have invested scholarship money for them to play and have a meaningful education, and be on a stage, then they have to pay those consequences. They have to understand that they take down what is valuable, they are lessening it, and those who would harbor them with less than the truth, are abetting in a crime.

Drugs are a terrible thing that can happen to a person many people die from them, and when they do, new victims are found by the dealers. Instead of turnover, we need to end this madness, and soon. Those who died from overdoses should not be condemned: they should be remembered as lives that were lost due to public acceptance of less than the right thing. The dealers on the other hand are getting rich, on the backs of our children.

Society creates the situations when they put on blinders to the real problems it should be facing. We have weak laws for texting and talking on cell phones while driving, and people can pay those silly little fines, but when they kill either someone else or themselves, we say how tragic, not what we need to do to stop the madness.

If we accept politicians who refuse to deal with these real problems then we shouldn’t vote for them, we should expose them as the political weaklings they are, the enablers that slap on the risk and don’t punish.

I think that putting someone in danger for selfish reasons, like texting while driving or driving while inebriated are serious crimes against society. $250 fines don’t do it; they don’t prevent these things from reoccurring time and time again. Jail time is too lenient also, and only a seriously hefty fine of years to payoff and harsher jail time is needed.

Just ask the thousands of mothers who have lost children due to drugs, and auto accidents, and those that are fighting daily to halt the madness before their children become victimized.

Drugs impact a lot in society, from the ridiculous “Designer drugs” to the territorial rights of gangs that shoot each other and wound or murder the innocents that happen to be standing near when the shooting started. They cost the lofcal police money that impacts our taxes, it causes schools to become places to be concerned because they need detectors to screen the kids before they enter the school building.

I for one am sick of it, but sicker yet of the shameless, weak politicians who won’t react vigorously enough to make selling drugs not worth the while, the users and offenders of the laws that are suppose to protect the public from being broken, from not being abusers. It would save lives and society.

The Democrats and Republicans are both equally to blame for this, gun or drug laws, it doesn’t seem to matter to them.