No! To the Tebow Bill

Recently, the Alabama Senate let the Tim Tebow bill die.  Good move, guys!  This bill would have allowed homeschooled youngsters play on high school sports teams.

Seriously, I think that only the students who actually go to a high school should get to play on their teams.  No home-schooled kids.  Sorry.

My reasons have nothing to do with politics.  Let's face it, some people play Liberals and Conservatives like a p.c. form of Cowboys and Indians much like their parents or grandparents got to play.   (Some people play that game as a way of getting away with acting like a dick; you know what I mean.)  And I'm not going into the superiority or inferiority of homeschooling.  That's inevitably going to be in a case-by-case situation.  (Maybe in some future post.)

No, it's this.  Going to high school has its ups and downs.  There's the friends, the extracurricular activities, the athletics, young love, groping, the Prom, hanging out in the hallway.  Balance that against homework, boring history classes, unpleasant assistant principals, the gym-like smell in the cafeteria, and so forth.  And, yes, some classmates are less than wonderful.

High school is a shared, collective experience.  And I think that it belongs to the students who happen to attend that school.  Not the School Boards.  Not the teachers.  Not the goddam Legislature.  No, to play football or to cheer for the school, or to be in dramatics, or to be in the band, you have to earn it.  By dragging your ass to that school every day.

And be a part of it all.  No skimming the cream off the top.

Do you wonder why high school football night is so big in small town Alabama?  Yes, it's something to do, in places that are dull.  But the local high school is a local common experience.  And this goes through life, and across generations.