Coincidences

An interesting set of coincidences- 19th December I rent a movie called Glory Road at the nearby video store. The movie is about a high school basketball coach, Don Haskins who scouts around the country for the best college basketball team and comes up with a team of 7 black players. This during the mid 60's when desegregation seemed like a punishment for the white folks and bussing was a demeaning exercise as far as these folks were concerned. It was during this time that Don Haskins put together a team of such prodigious black players at Texas Western College that they swept the NCAA championship that year. However the road to the championship was one filled with racial slurs, attacks and insults. But Don Haskins stood by them and told them to forget everything else and just go out there to play basketball, that's all. Interesting movie but horribly made, there were too many cliched performances and a lot of the material could have been dealth with much better.

20th December 2006- I am on my way home and take a bus at Newtown station. As I board the bus there is a Chinese man in front of me and when he tries to sit next to an Australian middle-aged man, the Aussie man vociferously protests and tells him to get lost and sit somewhere else and to not lay his coloured hands on him. He had finished saying that when I stepped onto the bus and suddenly everyone in the bus fell silent in anticipation of what would happen next. I just grabbed a seat elsewhere and got to reading my book. At the next stop the Aussie gentleman was getting off and as he stepped out, a black woman stepped upto him and said-"You are disgusting" for which he turned back stepped onto the bus and screamed-"You all get out of my country" to which my neighbour showed him his middle finger.

As the bus left, it felt funny to think about how much the times have changed and yet there are things that happen which make you wonder, have they really changed so much. The bus was almost full and there was hardly any protest from anybody else. It could be apathy or just plain indifference and yet weren't these that caused all the problems in the first place. It felt like a disconnect of sorts and I walked back home thinking - so this is what it feels like. Hmm...