Obama and Pelini

During my youth, people were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and hung from the nearest tall tree for no other reason than the color of their skin. Churches and schools were bombed and burned down only because the people that attended them were black.

I watched on our grainy black-and-white television set at home as federal troops escorted nine black students to school at Little Rock Central High School and listened to the taunts and the name-calling of the racist crowd that had gathered in opposition to integration.

I watched the same television set as police dogs and fire hoses were turned on blacks marching peacefully in Alabama in protest of the lack of rights they had been given by the government one hundred years after slavery had been abolished.

In the summer before my senior year in high school, several young people from my church helped the Baptist church located in the black community a few miles south of our town hold their very first Vacation Bible School. A few days after Bible school graduation, I sat in our living room and watched and listened as my uncle, the person I loved more than anything or anybody, went to the front door with his shotgun and told one of my black Bible school students who had come by the house to thank "Mr. Mike" for helping give them a Vacation Bible School of their own to get off our porch, get out of town and never come back. Blacks were required back then to call every white person Mr. or Miss, regardless of our age.

I grew up in the days of "colored" water fountains, white hotels and "colored" hotels, white restaurants and "colored" restaurants, and blacks being required to sit at the back of the bus and I never knew why this was because I'd had no interaction with people of color at all. Once I moved to Tulsa, joined the police department and started interacting with blacks, I quickly discovered that it's impossible to tag an individual with group characteristics. Although stereotypes abound for all different kinds of groups, the fact is that we're all individuals and there are good ones and bad ones in every single group. When we make the effort to discover that, we learn to evaluate people on their individual behavior rather than their group membership.

I provide this background because of the historic event that happened this past Tuesday. Americans of all creeds and colors elected the first black President of the United States and, according to research conducted after the election, race played hardly any role at all in how people voted. They chose whom they believed to be the best person to steady our ship and get us back on the right path.

This particular year, it was a man who the experts say ran the best political campaign for the presidency ever, who stuck to his message, who never got rattled, and who lost not one single member from his campaign staff. And because of those things and more, he won the presidency by an impressive six percentage points. It was something I never expected to see in my lifetime.

I hope that Americans will give him a chance to lead, a chance to implement his agenda, and a chance to live up to his campaign promises. One telling thing about his sweeping win is that he won across so many different social and ethnic categories that he is beholding to no particular group for his election and I believe that will allow him to govern from the center.

This may, in fact, disappoint some of the people that supported him, believing that he owes them special favors, but I think and hope that he'll not do that. He said in his acceptance speech that he would represent all Americans and that he would work tirelessly to win over the support of those who voted against him. I think he deserves, as any president would, a chance to prove himself by his actions.

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I thought that Bo Pelini was an embarrassment Saturday night in regard to his behavior during the fourth quarter in the game against Oklahoma. He grabbed one of his players by his face mask, berated his coaches and the coach upstairs he was talking to on his headset in front of his players and a national television audience and chewed on the line judge for a solid 10 minutes, even though the Huskers were behind by 40 points while he was doing this.

Some people excuse his behavior by saying he just has a "fiery" personality and that he wants to win so bad, sometimes his dark side comes out. What comes out is a lack of self-control and he has exhibited that trait for as long as he's been coaching. Self-control isn't something you can go down to the store and buy or pick off a tree.

Self-control has to be learned and the only way it can be learned is for it to be taught. Someone somewhere allowed Pelini to get away with this kind of aberrant behavior when he was young and it became imprinted in his psyche and his personality. I didn't think this was the guy to lead Nebraska out of the college football wilderness and back to the elite status it had enjoyed for decades when he was hired and I still don't.

I was switching back and forth between the Nebraska/Oklahoma game and the Texas/Texas Tech game and the contrast between Pelini and Bob Stoops, Mack Brown, and Mike Leach was obvious and unassailable.

The other three coaches were calm and collected, looking ahead to what they were going to do next, both offensively and defensively, while Pelini was doing his "mad-man" act on the sideline. You might say that it was easy for Stoops to act that way because of the size of the lead he had and you would be right.

But in Lubbock, two top 10 teams were playing for a possible national championship date, the game was close, either side could win, and yet they were conducting themselves with dignity and class. It's hard to acquire dignity, class, and self-control if you don't already have them.

Bo might know football, but he's obviously lacking in the other characteristics that separate average coaches from good coaches and good coaches from great coaches.