As you can see, it’s a bright red Dodge Viper.  Vipers sport a 8.3L V10 engine that puts out around 500 horsepower and about 525 lb/ft of torque.  In stock trim, it can get to 60 mph from a standing start in less than four seconds and will run an 11-second quarter mile, if you are a good enough driver to handle it.

I continued on to my vehicle.  It is also a bright red Dodge.

My vehicle is also a Dodge, and is also red, like the Viper that was parked not 50 feet away.  My truck has a 5.2L V8 that puts out 225 hp and about 300 lb/ft of torque.  In my experience, if the truck is feeling incredibly motivated, you can maybe get it to 60 from a dead stop in eight seconds or so, but usually when you ask it to accelerate it behaves like a teenager when asked to do the dishes.

Just because my truck is a red Dodge doesn’t mean it is a Viper.  No amount of me wanting it to be a Viper will make it so.

If I wanted, I could paint “Viper” on the side.  Or I could go online and, for a few bones, buy a Viper emblem to slap on the hood.  I could refer to my truck as “my Dodge Viper” and insist that others do the same.  I could enter it in car shows in the same class as other Vipers.  I could even pull up alongside people on the road or in a parking lot who are in a Dodge Viper and say, “Hey, check it out!  We both have the same car!”

This is something that seems pretty obvious, yet if you are paying attention you’ll be surprised how often this happens in real life.  For example, someone might want to criticize your weaknesses, but they don’t want to call it that, because that’s mean to do.  So instead, they tell you they are “giving you feedback” on your “growth areas.”  And then they proceed to criticize your weaknesses anyway, but they somehow feel better about it because they called it something else.  Or your buddy who is knee-deep in a MLM scheme will offer you a great new opportunity, because he’d never want to admit doing what he’s really doing, which is trying to rip you off.

My favorite example of this is something you see on nearly every Disney DVD.  Soon after the DVD starts up, a friendly voice invites you to take advantage of “Disney’s FastPlay” which, interestingly, is the slower of two options for playing the DVD.  Calling it “FastPlay” is not only a misnomer, it is a flat-out lie.

My best guess is that they think doing this is going to make me feel better about it, somehow.  Unfortunately for them, I happen to not be a complete doofus.  So instead it ends up insulting my intelligence because it makes me wonder what they must think of me to assume they can trick me into thinking a red Dodge pickup truck with “Viper” painted on the side is the same thing as a real red Dodge Viper.

Proactivity might be one of the most misunderstood and abused terms in business today and over the past decade.  As it is described in Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, it is a powerful principle that enables a person to realize they are truly in control of their own life and that it is up to them to make their life what they want of it.  As it is used in business, however, it is a catch-all used by management to lay blame at the feet of individual contributors.  For as much as business people use the term, it is surprising to see how poorly they really understand it.

(I believe Scott Adams would agree with me; hence the cartoon above.)

I’ve been told countless times in a business context that I need to be “more proactive.”  One of the champions of this was IBM.  I was hired by IBM in April of 1998 to port a server application from a mainframe to an RS6000 UNIX platform.  Funny thing was, once I started I found out something kinda funny:  My team didn’t have access to a UNIX machine for me to program on, and didn’t have budget to buy one.  I spent the better part of that year prototyping the code on my Windows laptop, hoping it would work on a UNIX machine, along with searching throughout the site for groups with unused UNIX workstations that I could repurpose for my needs.  It took several months before I finally found a refurbished RS6000 machine that we could afford and was able to arrange to have it shipped to Boulder where I worked.  Finally I had the right equipment to do the job I had been hired for many months before.

At my annual review, I was a bit surprised to hear in my feedback that the company was disappointed in the work I’d done.  Given the constraints on budget and purchasing, and given my organization’s complete lack of any knowledge whatsoever as to how to even acquire the hardware I needed, I felt I’d done a pretty good job of finding what we needed to move forward.  Instead, my feedback was that I hadn’t made nearly the progress on the code that they had hoped for.

When I pointed out to them, “But, you failed to provide me the equipment I needed to produce this code,” their response was, “Well, you need to be more proactive.”

I heard it then and I’ve heard it a lot since.

Last week after we exited the freeway where there was no exit ramp, I thought about this a lot for a good 24 hours or so.  I felt horrible about what had happened.  I felt bad for what had happened to the car, bad for frightening my son, bad for nearly having a serious accident.  I thought over and over about all the things I could have done differently.  Most dominant in my mind was this:  I could have assumed that the driver of the other car would suddenly move over into my lane and cut me off and force me off the road.  I could have assumed that he would not see me there.  I could have passed at a different spot on the freeway.  I could have …, I could have …, I could have …

Then I suddenly realized:  No, Matt.  No.  When a person is driving, it is THEIR responsibility to make a safe lane change.  I was established in my lane.  The other driver did not make a safe lane change.  It was his fault.  Not mine.  His.

I realized that I’ve been trained to feel responsible for things that are not my fault.  I’ve been trained to feel guilty when something I’m associated with goes poorly, as though I am automatically responsible for the success or failure of anything with which I have any association.

Fact is, this is just simply not true.  Proactivity means to accept responsibility for those things which are your responsibility, and to take it upon yourself to take action, make the best of things, and improve your life and those around you, true.  But it doesn’t mean that you accept blame or feel guilty for things you are not responsible for.

If, heaven forbid, one of my children were to start using drugs, I would feel terribly about that.  I would examine the situation and do everything in my power to help change the situation, to support their attempts to quit, to get them the help they need, whatever.  That is being proactive.  But I would not take the blame for their choice.  My children know that it is wrong to use drugs.  They’ve been taught.  They ultimately have a right to choose, and I don’t have to accept full responsibility for their choices in order to be a proactive person.

The driver of the red car made an unsafe lane change.  Can I drive more defensively in the future?  Sure.  Can I do a better job of assuming the person I’m passing doesn’t know I’m there?  Yes.  Is my accident last year my fault?  No.  No it is not.  And I’m not going to waste another second of my life feeling guilty about something that isn’t my fault.

I’ve raved before about “7 Habits” and, without question, I’m a Covey disciple.  Proactivity is a key guiding principle of my life.  But sometimes, it isn’t my fault.

Today the snowplows came by to clear the street that did not need to be cleared anymore.  This was the result:

Snow Boulder

I have a hard time seeing how anyone could think this was helping.  Next time, Spanish Fork Snowplow-Person, if this is how you are going to “help”, don’t bother.

(Tagged “humor”, because I’m sure it will be funny someday.)

When people have something to say, I use that to gauge how well I did at communicating my point of view.  For my previous post, “Outside the In-Crowd”, I can tell from the response that I didn’t do a very good job communicating.  For the record, I want to make it clear that I really do appreciate the responses and the care behind them.  That means a lot to me.  The fact that I didn’t convey my message well is not your fault and it doesn’t make your comments less meaningful.

When I wrote that blog post, I was trying to convey a simple realization that I’d had.  It’s a twofold realization.

The first, er, fold, is as follows:  One of two things happens when you put a group of people together.  Either the group will generally concede to be accepting and interested in everyone, or some subset of the group will work together to elevate themselves by pushing the others down.  I don’t think this is necessarily done consciously or vindictively.  It just IS.

The second part is:  When a subset of the group bands together to elevate itself, the remaining members of the group have an interesting choice.  Being a majority, they can ignore the group trying to elevate itself and choose to be accepting and interested in everyone.  Taking this path disempowers the smaller group trying to elevate itself.  Ironically, most individuals in the majority support the smaller group by trying to get themselves into that group.  This is done by, in turn, pushing down other people.

This happens in junior high and high school, but I found it interesting to note that it doesn’t just happen there.  That’s simply a common thread I used to try to help make the point.

The general reaction I’ve had to this is basically this (okay, I’m exaggerating slightly):  Matt!  Why are you saying this?  I liked you in high school!  I know for a fact that at least some other people did as well!  Just because you could never get a date doesn’t mean you are a loser!  PLEASE DO NOT KILL YOURSELF!!!!!

To which I express my gratitude.  I appreciate your friendship.  My point is, I didn’t write the blog post because I’m insecure about whether I was popular in high school.  I don’t really care about that.  There are, however, a couple of things that I am concerned about:

• I don’t care about popularity in high school now (sheesh, that was, uh, more than 5 years ago), but I did then.  I’m ashamed to admit it but it’s true.  And I fear that I was one of those people on the outside trying to get in by pushing other people down.  I really do worry about this.  I fear and regret what I might have been like and hope I’ve changed.
• Even though I’m older now, and my friends and acquaintances are older now, I’m still seeing this and have been seeing it ever since.  I just now figured out how to make sense of it.  So my concern now is, now that I understand it and can quantify it, am I really changing?  Am I supporting the in-crowds by pushing down others around me in order to conform to the ideals of the in-crowds?  Or am I creating the ideal I would rather have, where people are generally accepting and interested in everyone else?  Do I still care about being accepted by the in-crowd?

See, the thing is, regardless of the context (high school, work, church, etc.), the nature of the in-crowd is the same.  And the appeal of in-crowd membership is entirely dependent on context.  Remove the context, and the appeal is gone.

It’s my hope that we will see this for what it is and disempower the in-crowds around us by simply refusing to give them the support they need from us to survive.  It’s my hope that we will instead work to be accepting and interested in others.  Hey, in a way it is a form of civil disobedience.  Cater to your rebel spirit!  Take a look around you and assess yourself.  I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say.

I’m sorry because that means your life in high school was the pits.  Of course, if you are like me, then college was excellent and you have a pretty great life now, so I take it back.  I’m not sorry.

Probably every high school has this in-crowd of the cool people.  Only a few people get to be a part of this in-crowd.  Everyone else is outside looking in.  Some people get to a point where they realize they are not going to be a part of that crowd and go on with life.  Others try to figure out how to get into that crowd, in vain, because, hey, you are not cool like the in-crowd.

It isn’t until later that many of these people look back objectively and realize, what was so great about the in-crowd?  And who decided they were cool anyway?  The in-crowd did!  They decided they were cool and created rules to keep themselves that way.  Oddly, those on the outside looking in supported the rules and preserved the image, spiting themselves in the process.

After they get away from the immediate situation and gain additional perspective and context (for example, going to college), they realize how dumb this was.  In high school being cool is about being another boring clone of sameness of the self-proclaimed “cool” people, whereas in college it is entirely different.  In college, it is about being unique, interesting, and friendly, showing concern for and interest in others, and being true to yourself.

Additionally, once you spend some time away from high school, you start to see the other “cool” kids for who they really are, and you realize that some of them are really not that cool or interesting at all.  It was all just a façade, supported by the immediate context.  Once the context changes, the façade disappears.  And it doesn’t bother you that you weren’t part of the in-crowd back then.

So here’s the question:

What about the organizations you are involved in today?  Does your employment resemble high school or college?  What about your church, or your neighborhood?

For example, how do you get to be one of the in-crowd at your job?  What does it take to be cool?  Are you considered cool because of your unique talents, because of your interesting perspective, because you are a valuable, concerned team member?  Or do you have to conform and be just like the other cool kids to also be cool?

If your job, or any other organization you belong to, resembles high school, maybe you need a change of context.  If you look at this in-crowd from a different, distanced, more objective point of view, maybe they won’t all seem as cool as they do from the work context.  Maybe not being part of the in-crowd won’t be such a big deal.

As everyone knows, the purpose for Facebook is to help you connect with old friends, like that girl who wouldn’t go with you to Homecoming, you know, to see if her life is in the crapper and she got what she deserved for snubbing you.  So I’ve been using Facebook for it’s designated purpose, and I’ve found a bunch of the people I went to high school with, who, inexplicably, all seem to have great lives despite the fact that I pretty much never had a date in high school.

Since the reunion is tomorrow, many of them have been asking me whether I’m coming to the reunion.  When I say, “No,” they want to know the reason, and so I tell them, “Because.”  This reasoning seems to work well when I’m explaining to my son why he has to mow the lawn, but it doesn’t seem to be working with the old high school friends.

So, in order to avoid explaining this a hundred times, I decided to just write a simple blog post about it.

I actually alluded to this in another post some time ago, but basically the issue is this:

I’m not a fan of high-school Matt.

I’m a fan of perpetually-29 Matt.  That guy is happy with himself, he’s confident, he makes loud noises on a guitar when he feels like it, drives a pretty cool car, mostly wears T-shirts to work, and has great taste in music and movies.  He’s got a wonderful wife and a great family that are awesome to hang out with.  He’s a pretty darn good software engineer and he doesn’t even feel nerdy about it (well, not TOO nerdy).  He’s so dang funny that it is sinful.  He feels free to be himself pretty much all the time and enjoys his life.

He’s not like high-school Matt at all.  High school Matt was ignored because he wasn’t athletic and ridiculed because he was smart.  High school Matt carried labels given him by other people that worked so well even HE thought that’s what he was like.  He didn’t feel good about himself for who he was and instead kept trying to pretend he was someone he wasn’t and fit in with a crowd of people that he didn’t fit with and date the girls who weren’t interested in dating him.  Even worse, he ignored the crowd he could have fit with and the girls he could have dated instead.  He was a poser and a fake, someone who didn’t value his own abilities and instead kept trying to make himself into something he wasn’t.

Whenever I’m around high school people again, high-school Matt tries to come out.  I don’t like high-school Matt.  He makes me feel ashamed of myself, not only of my past but of who I am now, almost as though who I am today is not good enough even though I’m quite happy with it.  He makes me act like someone I’m not, someone I don’t like, someone like him.  So I try to keep him hidden.

And the best way to keep him hidden is to avoid situations where he insists on coming out.  And if I go to the reunion, he will insist.

I’ve really enjoyed catching up with those friends on Facebook and hearing about their lives today.  I’m not really interested in letting high-school Matt come out to feel like a loser again in person.

So, thanks anyway, but I won’t be going.  Don’t be offended.  Or, take offense, whatever, I don’t care.  High-school Matt is obsessed with what you think of him, but that dude is gone.  The current version wants to be your friend, but only at face value.  Otherwise, nevermind.

So, for the record, I’m decidedly pro-education.  I have a lot of opinion on the topic, and since this is my blog I guess it’s time I break the ice here and start talking about it.  Nevertheless, I’m sure that there are people who are going to take my opinions as being an attack on education or even themselves personally, even though I’m just now calling them out on it.  It isn’t meant that way.  But whatever.

Back to the topic.

I was thinking about this question the other day.  Actually, quite a while ago.  It was picture day at school, and so that morning the kids were concerned about what to wear and what does their hair look like and other such things.

For some reason it occurred to me:  Why do they even have picture day at school in the first place?

The de-facto knee-jerk answer to this question is:  ”So you can have a picture of your child!  Don’t you want a picture of your child?  You know, someday your child will be grown up and you’ll wish you had something to remember their childhood by!  What is wrong with you anyway?!?”

See, the thing is, that is not the answer to my question.  That’s the answer to the question, “Why should I have portraits taken of my child?”  But my question is, why is it done at school?

It surely was not always this way.  If you went back far enough — 50 years, or 80, or 100? — you would certainly get to a time period where kids went to school but there was no picture day.

I can envision the business model here, for a company like LifeTouch that does school picture days all over the place, or at least Utah.  It is actually pretty sweet.  There’s no real estate costs, since you don’t have a studio.  You just set up at the school you are at every day.  You’ve got business automatically provided to you.  In a single day, you might shoot 100, or 200, or even 500 portraits.  Even if you only sold a $20 package to half of the, say, 200 portraits you shoot in a day, that’s $2000 of income in a single day!  That’s a pretty sweet business!

What really struck me as odd was when I asked my wife why our kids were even participating.  See, my wife worked as a professional photographer when we were first married, shooting high school, prom, bridal, and family portraits among other things in a full studio setting, with adjustable lighting and props and everything.  She can do just fine shooting pictures of my kids.  So for years we’ve avoided spending the admittedly lofty prices for boring picture packages from school and instead we’ve shot our own, which are much more interesting and are of comparable to better quality, and less expensive.

Knowing this, I didn’t understand why our kids were even having their pictures taken.  I mean, we know already that we aren’t going to buy any.  Why make the photographer shoot and develop pictures we know we aren’t going to buy?  So I asked Amber, and she said, “Well, it is harder to get them out of it than just to have them go along with it.”

I thought about that, and it makes sense.  Of course it is hard for the teacher to monitor kids that are getting pictures taken if some of them are also back in the classroom not getting pictures taken.  And of course it is hard for the teacher to know if the kids parents really don’t want their picture taken or whether it is just that the child himself is trying to avoid the picture for some reason.

But why is it even the teacher’s responsibility in the first place?

This was what finally hit me.  The teacher’s job is to teach my kids.  Why is there even a school picture day?  Why is it that educators, who have a minimum number of days that they must provide instruction for our kids, are counting as a day of instruction one where time is spent shuffling kids through a picture-taking process that has nothing to do with their education?

I don’t know the real reason, but I’m willing to bet it rhymes with Sick Jack.  But for most people, including education professionals, I don’t think they ever even think about it.  We’ve always had school pictures.  It is just part of the schedule.

I’m not particularly opposed to school pictures, but I fear it is setting a bad precedent.

In years past, they’ve held a book fair at my kids’ elementary.  I seem to remember this going on when I was in elementary school also.  The kids would go down to the book fair, as a class, and look through the books that were available for purchase.  Then their assignment is to come home and pester their parents for money to buy books.  Presumably this is allowed because books are educational, although one time I actually went to the book fair and only about half of the items for sale in the book fair were books.

It gets worse.  This past year at my kids’ elementary, there was another similar thing going on.  It operated exactly like the book fair.  As classes the kids were taken down to this little store that was set up in part of the school.  They were instructed by their teachers to go through the store and identify the things they wanted to buy, and how much they cost.  Then they were told to come home and discuss with their parents the things they wanted.  Then the next day they should bring their money, because they would go down to the store again as a class and anyone who brought money could buy stuff from the store.

Consider:  At this point, we’ve given up on trying to have anything in the store even remotely resemble education.  They pitched this as a finance unit, where kids could learn about how much things cost and how to pay for them.  In our case, however, this was no different than when our kids come with us to a regular store (you know, the kind that pays for its own real estate), where their job is to ask us for money to buy stuff they don’t need, and our job is to say, “No.”  The only difference is that the crap in this store at the school was significantly overpriced.  Significantly overpriced.

Well, when our kids came home and asked for money, of course we said, “No.”  We told them they were free to blow their own money on stuff, which they did.  The sad part of this story is that my daughter spent about $25 of her own money to buy Christmas presents at the store.  She spent about half of what she earns in a year to buy stuff she could have picked up at the dollar store for about $5.

She did this because the store was at the school, and because she was taken down to that store with her class, and encouraged to look at what she wanted to buy, and then come back with the money.  And she spent her own money because, unlike much of the world, we don’t want to encourage our kids to blow money on stuff they don’t need, and so we push back.

It angers me that this situation was even there in the first place.  Someone is setting up a business where they don’t have any real estate, instead setting their shop up in public schools.  Why in the world are we allowing private businesses to run out of a public school?  Why are we allowing children to go down to patronize these businesses as a part of their day that is supposed to be spent learning?

This is something that simply should not be happening, in my opinion.  The only logical reason I can think of why this happens is because the school system profits financially from doing it.  I can’t explain it any other way.  And if I’m right, it really makes me upset to think that the public education system is tricking people into funding the system and shortchanging our kids education in the same process.

It’s very refreshing, especially in a social culture that is so different.  I don’t know if it is a Utah thing or a Mormon thing, but in most groups around here people don’t communicate this way.  Companies I’ve worked for in the past usually pretended to care about my opinion but didn’t, or really weren’t interested in what I had to say.  Or they would openly make it clear that they actively believed that my opinion was worthless.  I yearned for a place that valued every opinion, and I found it at Microsoft.  I love that.

It’s not all roses, though.

Hearing feedback about how to improve at your job isn’t too hard to take.  That’s just stuff like a suggestion about a design pattern that will help you solve a problem you’re facing, or someone pointing out to you that your implementation is not threadsafe and suggesting how to address it.  Even when the feedback urges you a little out of your comfort zone, for example to confront someone about a concern, it isn’t that bad.

It’s much harder when the feedback you get is telling you that you have to change something that is just a part of who you are.

The first type of feedback doesn’t even have to do with you personally.  It’s just coaching on how you do your job.  You aren’t your job (or at least you shouldn’t be).  The second type of feedback might have a little to do with you, but it is more about encouraging you to improve on something you already want to improve on anyway.

The last type is the type I got last week.  I won’t go into any details on it, but the general summary of it is this:  ”There’s a handful of character flaws, inherent in your personality, that you need to overcome in order to move forward in your career.”

Or to rephrase:  I was good enough as I am now to get my current position, but I’m not good enough as I am now to move ahead.

Truth is, we all need to learn to take feedback like that.  It’s all about becoming the best version of ourselves.  Nobody on this earth is perfect, so we all have things to improve on.  But when it isn’t your skillset or your approach but your lifelong self that isn’t good enough, wow.  I’m gonna have to dig deep to learn to deal with that.

I don’t mean “hard” as in trying to drive to work in the snow.  I mean something really hard, like earning a college degree or starting a successful side business or losing 20 pounds.

If you’re familiar with the LDS faith you are probably aware that many young LDS men serve a two-year mission when they are about 19 years old; they are certainly expected to.

I teach a Sunday School class comprised of high-school-age youth, and not long ago as I was preparing the lesson I could see that this topic was going to come up.  I thought about my own mission, which I served in southern Spain from 1991 to 1993.  I was preparing to tell them something I’d found to be true about my own mission, which was that although it was very hard to do, I’ve never regretted having done it for an instant.  I know that same statement holds true for pretty much every person I know who’s done it.  And I also have many friends who did not go, and the general consensus among them is regret — regret for not having done it.

I thought about how true that is about many things in life.  I thought about some other hard things I’ve done, like graduating from college, proposing and shipping a controversial product, or raising a family.  It isn’t just that you are ultimately glad that you did those hard things.  When you look back on your life, you realize that a lot of the things that define your life, a lot of those things you are most proud of, were difficult things that you probably didn’t really want to do at the time.

Isn’t it odd how much we resist doing those hard things, even when we know how meaningful those experiences will be later?  I’ve never heard of a person who said, “Yeah, instead of going to college I just wasted five years of my life playing video games all day long in my parent’s basement, and boy am I glad I made that choice.”

This has been a humbling but important realization for me going into 2010.  There are a number of really important, hard things that I need to get started on right now.  I took the opportunity to look ahead and imagine myself five or ten years from now.  I imagined looking back at 2010 as if I had done those hard things.  I thought about how relieved and pleased I’d be that I had chosen to do those hard things back then, and I could imagine how much better my life would be after having done these hard things.  I could also see how my life would be if, instead of doing those hard things, I kept doing things the way I’m doing them now, that is to say, easier but not life-altering.

Having done this introspection, I know now I’ll look back, either way, at 2010.  It will either be the pivotal year when I made the big changes to improve my life, or it will be just another year in my life where I chose the easy road to mediocrity.

So, I’m doing some hard things this year.  Some of them have to do with my career, so you’ll find out about them.  Some of them are personal, so I’ll only talk about them in generalities.  Either way, 2010 will be a year to remember for me.  It’s going to be a hard year, one that I won’t regret.

The Hall of Fame quarterback that led that famous team, Bob Griese, went on to become one of the best color commentators in college football.  Yet he now risks being remembered more for the remark he made on October 24, 2009, when a list of the current NASCAR top five drivers was displayed on screen.  Regarding the fact that driver Juan Pablo Montoya’s name was not shown, as explanation Griese quipped, “He’s out having a taco.”

Griese certainly did not consider his words before he said them.  He apologized during the game and later that day.  He was given a one-game suspension by ESPN for it, but I have to wonder if the real punishment is yet to come.

This whole thing has been bothering me ever since it happened, because frankly, I think it’s way past time for people to lighten up a little bit.

Before you cinch the noose around my neck, let me say a couple of things first.  I have many great friends of varied ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds that I’ve made over the course of my life who I cherish and value, not only for the perspective they provide which broadens my own perspective, but for the numerous ways in which we are the same, as well as the ways in which we are different.  I have been greatly enriched by having the opportunity throughout my career to benefit from diversity in the places where I’ve worked — I value that experience tremendously.  And, believe it or not, I come from a background that’s endured its own share of discriminatory treatment.  More on that later.

Because of those valued relationships, even more than what people might think of me in general, I’ve been measured in blogging about this.  But I’ve got to tell you:  I think we’re taking this whole discrimination thing way too far.  I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way.

First off, I’ll state that, in my opinion, Mr. Griese should not have said what he said.  He knows it.  He knew it right after he said it.  ESPN also thinks he should not have said it, and I agree with them.

Now that we’ve established that, I’d like to figure out exactly why what he said is considered offensive.

• Eating — I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.  Every person eats.
• Eating A Taco — As far as I can tell, the act of eating a taco itself isn’t offensive, nor would it be offensive to suggest that a person might eat a taco.  I have eaten a taco.  More than one, in fact.  I’m not ashamed of it.  If you were to tell someone who does not read my blog that I have eaten a taco before, not only will I not be offended, but the other person will wonder why this is a big deal.  So I can only assume that it is not the suggestion of eating a taco itself that was offensive.
• Implying That Juan Pablo Montoya Is Hispanic — Whether Griese meant to imply that Juan Pablo Montoya was Hispanic is hard to say.  However, Juan Pablo Montoya IS Hispanic.  Columbian, in fact.  There’s nothing wrong with being Hispanic, or Columbian.  So implying that a Hispanic person is Hispanic shouldn’t be a problem.
• Implying That Juan Pablo Montoya Is Mexican — I honestly don’t know whether tacos are really Mexican or not.  I’m told they are.  But the tacos we eat here aren’t necessarily authentic anyway.  Regardless, there’s nothing wrong with being from Mexico; after all, Sammy Hagar lives there, at least some of the time.  And we already established that Montoya is from Columbia anyway, not Mexico.  I don’t see a problem here.
• Implying That Juan Pablo Montoya Eats Tacos — I don’t know whether Montoya eats tacos or not.  We already established that it is not offensive to say that I eat tacos.  Why would it be offensive to suggest that Montoya eats tacos?  There’s nothing wrong with eating tacos.
• Implying That Juan Pablo Montoya Eats Tacos Because He Is Hispanic — Well, now I think we may be getting somewhere, although I have to wonder why this matters.  Being Hispanic is not offensive.  Eating tacos is not offensive.  Is it offensive to suggest that Hispanic people eat tacos?  Can someone explain why this is?

On the day that Griese made this comment, NASCAR driver Ryan Newman was also not shown on the screen.  What if they had instead asked where Ryan Newman was instead of Montoya?  What if Griese had commented about Newman, “He’s out eating a hamburger.”  Certainly that would be equally offensive, right?

Or what if Griese had said the exact same thing — “He’s out eating a taco” — about Ryan Newman instead?  Would that also be offensive?

If it is not offensive when it is said about a Caucasian from the United States, why is it offensive when it is said about a Hispanic from Columbia?  I thought this whole thing was about treating all people as equals.  How is this treating people as equals?  Isn’t it wrong to treat people differently because of their differences, regardless of how we treat them?

This is society’s problem, not Montoya’s or Griese’s.  In our society, we’ve done a great job of identifying the people who have been discriminated against.  They are in protected classes.  Those are the people who have been discriminated against.  If you, like me, are not in a protected class, then it is not possible that others would discriminate against you.  In fact, according to society, I can only be the instigator of discrimination, not the victim, because I’m not in a protected class.

The problem here is, according to the popular interpretation, discriminatory treatment now has nothing to do with treating people equally and fairly.  It has to do with treating protected classes preferentially.  Ironically, we fail to realize that by treating others preferentially, we draw attention to the fact that there is a difference.  Treating them preferentially portrays the implication that they are uncapable of handling life the way the non-protected-class people face life, which is most certainly not true.  The reality is that we are equals.  Creating different sets of rules for different groups of people in society is exacerbating the problems and not solving anything.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, there was another group of people in the United States that were generally discriminated against by many in the general public.  Members of this group were publicly ridiculed; many others in society shunned and ostracized them, even members of their own families; much of the general public would refuse to live near them or patronize their businesses.  Prominent members were frequently subject to the wrath of mobs and riots, and even had property destroyed, and many were tortured publicly and even wrongly imprisoned.  Members of this group were so persecuted that many were forced to abandon homes and property numerous times as they moved again and again attempting to find a place where they could live peaceably.  Conditions escalated to the point that laws were changed in places such that it was not considered a crime to murder a member of this group in cold blood.  This group repeatedly appealed to local and federal government for protection but were flatly and openly denied.  Many members of this group, including a number of leaders, were killed.  Our government did nothing to stop this.  Eventually members of this group had to leave the country and flee to a barren wasteland in order to be left alone.

This group was not different because of their ethnicity or national background.  This group of people were known as Mormons.  Religion was the difference between them and those who discriminated against them so strongly.  Because of their religion, which is the first freedom guaranteed us by the US Constitution, they were discriminated against, while the very government that should have guaranteed their freedom turned a blind eye or even in some cases participated in the discrimination, to the point that they had to leave the very country that should have guaranteed their rights in order to have any semblance of peace.

These are my ancestors.  Even today, people have no issues at all saying derogatory things about members of my faith.  They will make jokes about how many wives I have (1) or how many horns come out of my head (0) or whether I am allowed to drive a car or use electricity (yes to both).  I find it ironic that a comedian or talk-show host can make fun of my religion in a public forum wherein he will knowingly make statements he either doesn’t understand or knows full well are untrue, and yet someone like Bob Griese can inadvertently and completely by accident say something as apparently benign as “He’s out having a taco” and have the whole world ready to string him up in a tree for being so racist and discriminatory.

I’m fully aware of the history of my ancestors.  I’ve mentioned some of it here.  It is a bit disturbing to know that this happened here in the United States, just some 150 years ago or so.  But I’ve gotten over it, and so have the members of my faith.  We aren’t on a crusade to have society make right to us all the wrongs that their ancestors did to ours.  We’re not lobbying for our group to receive a special protected class status.  And honestly, when people make fun of Mormons eating funeral potatoes or lime jello with shredded carrots inside, we laugh along with them.  Even though I love funeral potatoes and avoid lime jello with shredded carrots like the disgusting fodder it is, it doesn’t bother me that people would joke about me eating either one.

In other words, I would not be offended if people claimed I ate food stereotypical of Mormons, whether I actually eat it or not.

It seems to me like we need to just relax a little bit, and choose not to be offended.  I’ve found my life is a lot happier when I do that.  How might society be if we all did this?  Seems like that is something worth pursuing.