Texas Priorities

If you drop a few drops of hydochloric acid and spill them on your shirt, your shirt will soon resemble Swiss cheese, being all hole-y and all.

If you drop those drops into a 55-gallon drum of water, the potency of the acid will be diluted to a point of ineffectiveness, and you'll have to find other ways to put holes in your shirt.

It's like that with other things too, even beyond the field of organic chemistry, of which I know next to nothing.

I'm thinking about the parents of the football players at Western Hills High School down in Texas, where high school football is like a religion, only with better attendance, and a marching band.  Their redoubtable Cougars football team recently took on Aledo High School down in Fort Worth, losing in a photo finish, 91-0.

91-0.

There's a great scene in the movie "The Last Picture Show," also set in Texas, when the local 11 get shellacked, and the next morning, the adults are hectoring some of the players, saying "Y'all ever heard of blocking and tackling?"  And one guy, when another spectator says he'd like to be proud of his hometown team, says, "Be easier if you had a better home town."

He.Could.Go.All.The.Way!

I set out to write about this, because those football parents in Western Hills actually filed charges of bullying against the team that beat their inept sons, 91-0.  "How dare they be better than Jim Bob and Donnie Jeff?" they fumed, as they went online to send in the formal complaint, which was soon found groundless by authorities.  I was all set to write about how this dilutes real cases of bullying, in which some kids are real true victims of sociopathic behavior from their classmates, many times with tragic consequences.  When a 12-year-old girl is harassed to the point at which suicide seems her only way out, that's bullying, and that's horrible.

Losing a football game?  It happens. It isn't bullying.

And here's what makes me want to file charges against Mr and Mrs Outraged Texans.  Google "Western Hills High School" and you come up with this story from 2011, when two baseball players from that august school were accused of killing baby chicks in some bizarre ritual intended to help them play baseball better through voodoo.

There is no record of outraged parents being thoroughly fed up and filing reports of bullying against the ballplayers. I mean, killing baby chicks?  No problem in Texas.  But don't you dare score more touchdowns than Cletus, Beauford and Wrangler Slim did.

'Cause we'll file papers on ya, consarn it!