Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

"Excuse me, Sir. Could you tell me what day it is?"

"It's Thursday, man."

"No. I mean the date."

"Oh, um, September something-or-other. Twentieth, I think?"

"Yeah, but I mean the year."

Blank stare.

Does anyone beside me feel like you woke up in the wrong decade (or century, for that matter) this morning? Here we are, seven years into a new century of enlightenment, advancement, and human progress and buses were loaded all across the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave and pointed toward the little jerkwater town of Jena, Louisiana to march for the liberation of the Jena 6.



Meanwhile, HBO's favorite race card player, Bryant Gumbel, on his TV program Real Sports, will air an interview with black NFL quarterback Donovan McNabb tonight in which McNabb claims he is under extra scrutiny as an NFL quarterback because of the color of skin. Here is a quote from the McNabb interview:

"There's not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little
bit extra," McNabb tells HBO. "Because the percentage of us playing this
position, which people didn't want us to play ... is low, so we do a little
extra.""I pass for 300 yards, our team wins by seven, [mimicking] 'Ah, he
could've made this throw, they would have scored if he did this."

I don't plan to enter into any debate over the merits of the march in Jena or the validity of McNabb's assertions. All I really want to do is rub my eyes and wake up back in the twenty-first century, where a man is judged not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character...



Whether he is a quarterback that couldn't seem to the throw the ball in the ocean off the bough of a schooner...or a black kid in the backwoods of a state progress apparently forgot.

It's 2007, dammit!