Saturday Newsbreak: 9/22

--Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has expressed plans to visit the site of the World Trade Center and lay a wreath there on his upcoming trip to speak at the United Nations in New York. And, naturally, a lot of people aren’t too happy with that. This includes faltering Presidential candidate, Republican Mitt Romney, who’s taken up Ahmadinejad’s visit as a safe campaign issue to rant indignantly about. Then, not to be outdone, candidates John McCain and Fred Thompson felt compelled to make tough, “brave” statements putting down the Iranian president. Ahmadinejad has denied the Jewish Holocaust during World War II and accused the European nations who have strict anti-holocaust-denial laws of using the issue to have European Jews immigrate to Israel. This denial of proven history on the part of Ahmadinejad has given him many enemies in the West. But he is the official leader of Iran, a large, important nation which the US and the United Nations as a body are trying to dissuade from developing nuclear weapons. To me, in spite of all of this individual’s personal shortcomings, he should be welcomed at the site to pay his respects. I believe that symbolic acts such as this one, or the American ping-pong team’s visit to China in 1971, can be ground-breakers, opening previously-locked doors and leading to greater mutual understanding and reconciliation. Both Iran and the United States have long lists of grievances that they harbor against each other. I believe that, at some time in the future, these two great nations will become allies. But first, one step at a time!

--The small Louisiana town of Jena is in the national spotlight for a ridiculous escalation of petty racial feuds, starting with who got to sit under a certain tree, of all things! With each affront, the other side would increase its response until we now have a situation where people’s freedoms and lives are at stake. My take on what happened there is that there is some residual white-supremacist “throwback” sentiment in Jena among some whites who believe that blacks have to stay in their “place”. But this is the 21st century, and such attitudes need to be firmly countered. The situation there, as I saw it, was that the white offenders in the conflict had their wrists slapped lightly, while black offenders were imprisoned and charged with serious felony crimes (even though they were minors). I’m glad that this conflict has achieved national attention and that many went there to express their views. But in the midst of all this, regardless of which position one holds, there was still a serious physical assault committed that needs legal redress.

--We’ve had here, for the last couple of days in north-central Florida, some really turbulent weather. On the satellite map, it looked like a tropical storm, but the sustained winds weren’t strong enough to merit a name for it. It’s has quickly swung around in the Gulf of Mexico, strengthened slightly, and then dumped a lot of nasty weather on the Gulf coast in the Florida panhandle.

--I picked up the University of Florida’s Independent Florida Alligator newspaper yesterday to get a sense of what’s going on down there on campus. The big buzz is still about student Andrew Meyer’s Taser incident at John Kerry’s campus visit. Both the newspaper’s editor and editorial cartoonist each quoted the same two nationally-known commentators in expressing their negative opinions of Meyer. And which distinguished opinion-makers did they cite? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central! If this is the direction that journalism is going, maybe I should just start reading The Onion for my news!

--The Florida Gators football team has shown, at least so far this year, that it is one of the premier squads in the country. Tim Tebow, their sophomore quarterback, seems to be increasingly the object of hero worship among the “Gator Nation”, something that’s a bit unsettling to me. Gator coach Urban Meyer has never stuck around with a team long enough to coach it in his third year (and really test how well his own recruits have developed). So, we’re in a sort of uncharted territory, but so far it looks very promising. Very tough LSU (at their stadium) is going to be UF’s opponent on October 6, though!