“I believe in yesterday…”
My last column, on Jan. 5, dealt with the positive influence of
athletics, particularly college athletics, on young women. I wrote that
Title IX was responsible for opening doors for women in education
including
college athletics, and mentioned the Bush Administration had formed a
commission to reform Title IX.
Well… yesterday that Commission met and basically preserved the
civil
rights law. The feared changes failed to happen. They deadlocked 7-7 on
a
plan to alter the requirement that the male and female athlete ratio be
roughly proportional to actual student enrollment. Whew!
It amuses me how equality of opportunity is construed by civil
rights
opponents (and male chauvinists) to mean quotas. Perhaps they could
enlighten us as to why there should be more opportunities for men than
women
to play sports in college? The real culprit, as I said in my column, is
football. Men’s football takes away scholarships that would go to other
men’s sports. Women’s sports don’t have that problem, so women’s
tennis,
track and swimming is not as threatened. Incidentally, the pro
opportunities
for women are not as lucrative and tempting, so there’s less pressure
on
female student-athletes to leave college. And they’re better able to
be… student-athletes.
Yesterday, a reporter with Associated Press in New York contacted
me. Turns
out he’s writing article about a proposal by Congressman Charlie Rangel
to
reinstate the draft and/or require some type of national service.
Rangel
is a great old-school liberal who represents the Harlem, Upper West
Side,
and Washington Heights areas in New York City. So the AP reporter came
across my article, which proposed a very similar thing, almost three
months
before! He called my column “foresightful” — which I doubt is a word,
but
I’ll take it as a compliment.
Anyway, I spoke briefly to him. We’ll see what happens. Chuck
Rangel’s
reasons were similar to mine — the all-volunteer armed forces are
staffed
disproportionately by the poor and minorities. Defending the country is
a
sacrifice that everyone should share. Shared sacrifice would make us
think
harder about sending our troops to war — if it was truly right and
necessary
and the cost was justified, who wouldn’t serve their country?
Unfortunately,
our top leaders (Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, etc.) never served in the
military
and don’t understand the cost to the enlisted men and their families,
nor
the horrors of a war they see only on computer screens and satellite
images.
At the same time, yesterday, I struggled to write a simple memo for
a law
school course. Maybe I’m seeking the wrong line of work. Or maybe
writer’s
block is resurfacing at a most inconvenient, and richly ironic, time…
“Let me forget about today until tomorrow…”