Responding to a Smart Reader

What occurs to me is that even when someone tries to avoid saying things which can be misinterpreted, there will be times when they can be misunderstood.  This is a lesson for everyone in our daily lives.  Even the most innocuous comment can be hurtful, even if not intended.  One reader responded to me that my comment about Jeremy Lin could be implied to mean that other basketball players are not smart.  The interrelations of race and intelligence have been an underlying negative force in the dialogue of American, and perhaps world, race relations for as long as I have been alive, and way before. 

My comment was meant to say that being smart is cool.  We have for years used terms such as geek and nerd to classify smart kids who don't have physiques like Arnold Schwartzenegger, who play chess, and who could run circles around us on a computer.  My generation, including me, call the "kids" when we can't figure out what we did to lose what we typed in the computer, and they have answers.  And can anyone look at Bill Gates, a college dropout (of course the college was Harvard), and have any doubt that being smart is cool?  Or Mark Zuckerberg?

Intelligence like that is a gift, no less than the ability to be a professional athlete.  Have no doubt, however that the achievements are not automatic.  Hours in a classroom, or a gym, or both.  Hours in analysis of problems whether on the field or the code printout.  Being neither a gifted, or even barely competent athlete, and not being as smart as I at one time thought I was, I appreciate both the jock and the geek, and wish them the best of the future.

But more importantly, I would like to see more emphasis on smart, because that is where the future will be determined.  Academics and athletics cannot be mutually exclusive activities in a school environment.  Too often we hear of athletes being allowed to progress through school simply because they are athletes, and the academics are not important.  This is especially true in college sports, which are the showcase, the lead-up, to professional sports.  If academics are ignored, we leave our student athletes short of the promise made to them--to get an education.  Why is that important?  Because there must be a foundation prepared when inevitably the skills diminish, when age sets in.  There is life after 30.  We must be sure that the kids who play ball are ready for it. 

Whether you are White or Black, Asian or Hispanic or Native American, or anything else, you can learn to be smart at something.  Finding what you do best is the means to a successful future.  Smart is cool.

Thanks for stopping by.