Instead of planting trees that expert agree is one key to cool global warming, humans are busy planting something else everywhere, anywhere. Sports included. Some athletes caught doping to enhance performance cry foul. A hand unseen secretly mixed banned substance to their drink. Or, in the case of Maria Sharapova, she claimed to have taken one drug without knowing it is listed in another name among banned substances.
American sprinter Marion Jones had another version of good faith. She unknowingly took performance-enhancing drugs but never wondered why she was lightning fast. While she served time for lying to federal investigators, others went unscathed after creating reasonable doubt the urine sample that tested positive for banned substances belongs to them.
But French tennis star Richard Gasquet was more imaginative. He tested positive for cocaine but claimed a woman who just took it planted an open mouth kiss on him. French kiss, no less, hence the residual transmission. He was cleared but the public knew better. A moment in the body’s thinnest skin, forever chagrined.
That is just in sports where the only motivation is winning. By cheating. In the arena of life where the ultimate motivation is survival, evidence is planted especially against the poor and powerless to reinforce their hard-to-prove guilt, or sometimes, to incriminate their innocence. The former is shortcut, the latter is neither short nor long, it just cuts. Due process never bled this bloody.
Even on vacation, you leave being planted with pain, anguish and humiliation for violating a silence policy that purportedly helped secure life and safety. How, logic will never do the trick. What we have known all along, but never did anything like there was nothing wrong, is the kind of silence that emboldens masterminds and their gunmen to kill with impunity. This despite knowing it does not involve the lawless only, but also the lawful, or at least what we thought was.
Why would you not be distraught, you wanted to enjoy what you thought was the bay, but are told to keep it at bay like you were in some solemn place where students pretend to study, otherwise known as the library. And, when a mother feels for her special child whose innocent excitement is muted by some immutable policy, she gets an insensitive, abrasive and offensive response in arrogant mimicry of punishing legitimate dissent. Sound is now incompatible with happiness, noise the enemy of celebration. Doesn’t make sense? Google your way in.
Even the feigned apology taunts and confuses maternal love with pride. Sorry is the language of humility, but it never sounded this bossy. And it’s not the first time, when instead of leaving with a bag of memories, you carry a baggage heavier than when you came, with trauma. And you just paid for it beyond compensation, even by resignation, otherwise known as damage control that only succeeded in offending legal terms and procedure.