I’m a passionate football fan.  I’ve loved the sport from an early age, and that love has not diminished over time.  No other sport so embodies the concept of team over individual as much.  Yesterday was a great day for football fans.  Brett Favre played a typical Brett Favre game, spectacular at times, flawed at others, but he gutted out a performance despite the Saints pounding his 40 year old body.  Drew Brees was magnificent.  Mark Sanchez proved that he belongs in the NFL, and Peyton Manning showed once again why he is one of the all-time greatest quarterbacks.

Despite all of the points scored and yardage gained, all four defenses played well, too.  While on paper it looks like the Jets defense got torched, they took away Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark, forcing Manning to find Collie and Garcon.  For the most part, their defense kept them in the game until the fourth quarter, and against an offense like the Colts, that’s not too shabby.

The Super Bowl should be fun.  Brees and Manning are two of the best playing today, and both defenses have enough play-makers to match-up well against the potent offenses.  While I like Peyton and all of his skills, I’m giving the edge to the Saints because of hunger.  The team really feels like it’s playing for the city to restore pride and dignity to the people after Katrina, and that’s an intangible that can’t be measured on the stats sheet.  The game will probably be fairly high-scoring with the Saints winning late.  However it ends up, it should be an exciting match-up between the two best teams this season.

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I wish I could be one of those cold, heartless men who use women and then forget about them.  Life would be a lot simpler.  Instead, I’m a sensitive artistic wimp who always ends up broken-hearted.  Women claim they want sensitivity, but in my experience, once they find it, they spend all of their energy trying to trample it.

I hate being a sensitive person.  It holds me back in everything I do.  I want to be a shark–unthinking, unfeeling, uninterested.  I guarantee my career would be much better off, and I couldn’t be much more alone than I am now.

Today we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a person who stood up against hate and injustice armed only with the conviction that righteousness would triumph over evil.  Most of us cannot imagine the courage it took to endure the intimidation, the ridicule, the threats, and the venom from the establishment.  Most of us cannot imagine the fears and doubts he must’ve felt as water hoses doused and attack dogs mauled his followers.  Yet he overcame those obstacles and stood firm in the belief that civil disobedience was the ultimate weapon in a democratic society.

Four decades later, many of the inequalities he marched against have been diminished, but many still remain.  Education is unequal between the haves and have-nots. Healthcare is unequal.  Political representation is unequal.  Today, the lines between African-Americans and Caucasians is not as much the battlefront as is the great chasm between those who have an excess of wealth and those who struggle just to survive.  I’m not implying that racism is dead.  Far from it.  We still have far to go to reach a point when people are truly judged by their character and not their skin tone, but today the biggest struggle is to find a way to close that chasm so that all Americans have an equal opportunity to compete, not just those born into privilege.

In a democratic republic, we have the opportunity to change the system and the establishment without raising weapons.  We can change the course of history and rewrite the future of this nation by standing together and refusing to surrender, even in the face of insurmountable odds.  I know this not as some abstract concept untested in reality but as a battle-tested truth.  I know because it happened before, and today, we honor the leader of that movement.

“We shall overcome.”

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