Where I'm from, Tim, they call that goatee of yours a "prison pussy"

This is just too much. And coincidental, too: my dad and I were just talking about this on the phone tonight. He brought up CNN's ongoing coverage and special editions focusing on under-the-radar white supremacy movements in America and all other things under the Racist Umbrella (it's a big umbrella, like the kind old people use).

So it's almost 5 a.m., and I'm studying for a state government and urban affairs exam I have in about nine hours. I check the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's webpage because I grew up on that paper, and I don't care that it sucks.

At any rate, I get to the site and the first headline that catches my eye reads: "Ex-NBA star says he hates 'gay people'."

The story, to sum it up, indicates that 5-time NBA All Star Tim Hardaway is a homophobe and damn proud of it. And why shouldn't he be? He's black, I mean, he wouldn't know the first thing about discrimination. And besides, why should someone who was lucky enough to be born after all the fighting for his rights was over want to even empathize with people who're discriminated against in very much the same ways his own race was? Preposterous...

Mr. Hardaway was appearing as a guest on Sports Talk 790, an Atlanta radio broadcast, when he was quoted as saying, "You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people." He later released a statement saying he regretted having made such remarks.

"I'm homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

He really iced his cake when he concluded by saying that if he found out a teammate of his was gay, he would ask that the player be removed from the team. Well, luckily for Tim, he really excelled in his last two seasons, averaging just 9.6 and 4.6 points per game. After consistently-declining stats in just about every category across the board really came to define his later seasons, Hardaway retired after the 2002-2003 season, playing only 10 games, starting none.

Hey, some guys ride cock and other guys ride the bench. Big deal.

Getting down to business, the real problem I have with this kind of close-minded banter is the overpowering and inherent hypocrisy and irony. Maybe it's really glaring and obvious in my head, and mine only but: this is a black man basically saying that he doesn't believe homosexuals should be allowed to exist. That he doesn't like it and wants them to stay away from him because it's wrong.

You know, we don't learn anything the first time around.

Gays and lesbians and transgender men and women are the final remaining class of people in this country that's prefectly okay, indeed socially acceptable and often encouraged, to bash and belittle and discriminate against. It's just so elementary: a gay person can't control their sexual orientation any better than Tim Hardaway can control the pigment of his skin. And if he can't grasp that concept then I hope he has a personal assistant taking care of all his affairs.

This is just reprehensible. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King would be absolutely disgusted. You couldn't contradict the teachings and message of the Civil Rights Movement much more effectively than Tim Hardaway already has. You know, in honor of Black History Month, here's a little History lesson dedicated to Mr. Hardaway: Bayard Rustin was an extremely close colleague and advisor of Dr. King and his wife Coretta, and, incidentally, the same gentleman who was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. I doubt Tim remembers reading or hearing about that. Because if he had, and if he knew a thing or two about Mr. Rustin, Mr. Hardaway would certainly know that Bayard Rustin was gay and that Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King knew this and supported it. In his later years, after the assassination of Dr. King, Rustin was a vocal activist in yet another Civil Rights Movement: the one for gay and lesbian rights. Coretta Scott King appeared at a recent Atlanta Gay Pride Festival and gave an eloquent and powerful speech, articulating her support for the New Civil Rights Movement.

You would think that any and everyone who remembers our history and that of the world, the awful things we've done to each other, would join together and put whatever qualms they have aside to make sure that this is the Last Civil Rights Movement our country ever needs. Yeah, you would think. But most people have forgotten precisely how to think.

It's really a dangerous thing to talk passionately and form opinions about things and people you really don't understand in the first place. And being informed as to the history and details of how your own race of people triumphed over bigotry and close-mindedness and other Neanderthal bullshit might be a good idea.

While I truly believe that every human on earth deserves the protections provided under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments (including gays, lesbians, and transgender men and women as a Protected Class), I seriously doubt sometimes the merits of awarding every American the rights provided by Amendments One through Ten, specifically the First.

Alex Busko

A little more than an hour’s drive south of Columbia, Missouri, just a few miles off US-54 and inside Lake of the Ozarks State Park, there's an incredible number of underground caves that were slowly carved into the Karst terrain. Missouri is actually believed to have more caves than any other state in the union.
The vast deposits of limestone that formed here hundreds of millions of years ago, indicating that central Missouri was once beneath a shallow, tropical sea, are what made these caves possible. Over an immense period of time, groundwater and streams and rivers began to dissolve and carve out paths through the exposed limestone; Rock Bridge Park is a perfect example just ten minutes off the University of Missouri – Columbia campus.
Well, in 1989, a man working with the Missouri Fisheries and Wildlife Service discovered something in one of these caves that rendered scientists and creationists equally dumbfounded.

Now known as the Ozark cavefish, it is eyeless – completely blind – and so devoid of pigment that it’s nearly translucent. It’s believed that at some point within the last few million years these fish were in a stream or creek that had carved its way into bedrock, forming extensive networks of caves and sinkholes.
The current led schools of fish into the darkness of a cave, and they never found their way out. A few of the stronger fish survived and reproduced, but many of the fish died out quickly. There was no light; nothing to guide them, no way to see their prey or their predators.
Over time, these fish underwent speciation. Their body chemistry changed, pigment disappeared, and having no use for their eyes, subsequent generations evolved with thick tissue covering their orbital sockets. They were dramatically different in every way from the fish that had entered the cave so many years before.

What I'm getting at, if it’s not somewhat obvious by this point, is that as creatures on the same earth as these cavefish, we’re essentially in the same boat (or cave). We are not immune. And although as luck would have it we happen to be the most evolved, the laws still apply to us in every single way.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who lived and learned and wrote a few decades before Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace would. He was a brilliant man.
So brilliant that one of his laws, developed from extensive reading, observation, and experimentation is still legitimate today, accepted by contemporary scientists. Lamarck wrote:

In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until finally it disappears.

We are in a cave of our own creation. And we are all endowed with things that, unless we make use of and strengthen, will eventually deteriorate until they are no longer functional or until they simply don't exist.
Dismiss this as the rant of a loon because, after all, you’re quite correct to assume that even if you did absolutely nothing for the rest of your life except watch TV, eat, sleep, shit, and fuck you could probably produce a fairly normal offspring: two arms, two legs, all that shit. This is true. And in the context of earth history our lives are equivalent to the click of a camera’s shutter, opening and closing, capturing just one slice of a second. It took millions of years for the normal fish that swam into the cave to become a new species. But light and normalcy vanished the second that stream disappeared into the earth.

The title at the top of this page reads THE RUMINATION. If that word is unfamiliar or if you don’t quite get the double entendre, you should probably click the BACK button until you get back to your MySpace or Xanga page. If you are familiar with the word, then ruminate on it for a few minutes.
Discourse has stood still for too long. We’re living in a place we don’t know a lot about, and some people are actually okay with that. We live in a place of vast misunderstanding and immense apathy. Just as there is so much around us that is important, there is just as much, probably more, that is absurd or hilarious or beautiful. And for this we should rejoice. It will be our job at the Rumination to bring you a healthy mix of the sick and the depraved, the hilarious and the outlandish, the reprehensible and the laughable. Do with it as you will.

Alex Busko