Main Street

Sports fanned
Did you pray for the Broncos? You weren’t alone. According to the monthly Religion News Surveys, more than half of Americans believe that supernatural forces have an influence on professional sports. Fifty-five percent of football fans believe in supernatural/religious forces, 33 percent pray for their favorite team, 31 percent believe that their team has been the victim of a curse, and 25 percent perform some sort of game-related supernatural ritual.
According to the survey, Midwesterners and Protestants are more likely to believe that God has a role in whether their team wins or loses, and one in five admit to a form of ritual, which includes wearing certain articles of clothing, talking to their television, or sitting in a special spot during the game.
Among my many unmanly traits is a disinterest in team sports, especially professional sports. I can enjoy the local version of Friday Night Lights at Recreation Park, or catch a Little League game at a local field, and who doesn’t like watching 6-year-olds run in circles and play soccer? But, watching juiced-up millionaires act like jerks? Not my cup of Racer 5, sorry.
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Each year, a variety of activist organizations issue report cards for local cities. The report from the American Lung Association is probably the best known. Healdsburg used to get high marks for being the first city in Sonoma County to ban smoking near public doorways, but we’ve slipped recently as ALA has moved on to other battles, such as smoking bans in apartment complexes that help keep secondhand smoke away from nonsmokers. In the last few years, Healdsburg hasn’t worked so hard to protect nonsmokers. Every bar in town has a posse of puffers outside and ashtrays by the doors, evidence that the battle rages on.
Sonoma County Conservation Action also issues a report card. Despite my being aligned with many of SCCA’s goals, the report cards rub me the wrong way. Healdsburg City Councilman Gary Plass, a proud Republican, would be considered a socialist in red states for his centrist approach to solving small town problems, but he gets bad grades from SCCA in the latest report card. Gary gets a D- for environmental voting and a C- for listening to citizens.
Gary is, after all, a third-term councilmember, so he can be expected to roll his eyes when certain people speak at City Council meetings, and his C- is probably for deportment. But, his D- for his voting record is pure partisan horse pucky. You can go back and look at Gary’s votes during the last year (I did) and he consistently votes with the progressive majority on almost everything. Gary’s problem is that the anonymous citizen advisors to SCCA don’t like him. And, that’s not fair.
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Do you use the all-weather track at Healdsburg High School? Watch the clock, it’s closed to the public from 2-7 p.m. on school days until June 7. Wait a minute, you say! We are paying for that all-weather track every year. It was built by school bonds and the community has a right to use it.
if you think that, you have a point. Healdsburg residents have a long history of using public school fields and vice versa. We walk the track, we drag our toddlers over to the playgrounds at HES, we throw the frisbee for our dogs on weekends, and in return the football, baseball and soccer teams play at public parks.
All this depends on people acting responsibly. This not only means not tearing up the football field when it’s been raining, it also means not hogging the track. I heard multiple reports of members of the public acting badly on the high school track, refusing to yield the inner lanes for track team practice. One older guy even shoulder-checked a track coach who asked him to use the outside lane.
School districts love to act like bureaucracies (which is roughly defined as: “punish the many for the actions of the few”), so a memo went out on January 14 that no one can use the track except track team members. It’s too bad that people act badly, and the innocent get punished for it.
Ray wants to know why jerks can’t get jerked around and the rest of us get left alone. He can be reached at [email protected].