It seems to me to be a lifetime ago. That surreal August changed a lot of people’s lives, some drastically and some, like mine, in a more subtle way.

A group of Muslims want to build a Mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero and this has somehow captured the attention of most Americans and has created fodder for news agencies world wide.

I must admit that I wasn’t even going to dignify this story by writing about it but it won’t get out of my head, it’s just too cold and stupid at the same time.

The Gainesville Sun recently reported:

“University of Florida football player Jamar Hornsby was released on his own recognizance Friday morning after he turned himself in on felony charges of credit card theft and fraudulent use of a credit card.

Alachua County sheriff’s deputies said Hornsby, 21, charged close to $3,000 on a credit card issued to Ashley Slonina, a UF student who died in an October 2007 motorcycle accident in which walk-on UF football player Michael Guilford also was killed.”

So basically, Hornsby took the credit card from a dead girl, someone he most likely knew, and he charged close to $3000 on it knowing that the girl’s parents would end up paying his bill after they just lost their daughter? Am I reading that right? Did I miss something? Is that not the coldest, meanest and also the most stupidest thing you’ve ever heard about?

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first; that’s just dumb ass stupid! Hornsby cannot be so stupid as to think that he would be able to just charge away and nobody would be the wiser. Could he have actually believed that the parents would just go on paying their daughter’s charge card bill, even after they buried her? Could he have believed for a minute that the parents and Law Enforcement would not catch up with him? I always gave athletes the benefit of the doubt, that it took brains as well as brawn to excel at the game but this idiot proves that it must not take any brains at all.

That was the easy part.

What does it take for a person to be so callous that they would think it was alright to steal a credit card from somebody they knew and who was tragically killed? How soul dead must they be to do that? We’re not talking about just being a thief, somebody who wants something for nothing and doesn’t care how it affects the person they’re stealing from, that’s bad enough. No, we’re talking about somebody who would steal from the parents of a friend or acquaintance, after that person, who they knew, was killed.

What sort of personality rot does it take for someone to think that this was acceptable behavior? All I know is that not only do I want him off the team, off any team for good, but I want him tried and if convicted, put in prison. I don’t want to see any plea deals or legal wrangling, I want Hornsby in prison where he belongs after he publicly apologizes to the victim’s family.

The sad part is that with all probability he won’t actually serve a day. There will probably be no apology and the victim’s parents will be lucky if they see dime one of restitution. And somewhere down the line, if he’s a decent football player, he will be back on a team and probably paid for it.

Am I the only one who finds this whole thing too screwed up to be real? Is there any way in this world that Hornsby could look in the mirror and be able to say to himself that it wasn’t any big deal? What did he care about the parents who had already gone through hell. He obviously didn’t care at all. He obviously doesn’t have the conscience it takes to be truly human.

Every job has its perks and its downsides, that’s the nature of the beast. We trade our time, the one thing we can’t ever get back, for what we need to survive.

Some career paths have high end quality perks; good salaries, excellent benefits, prestige, respect and accolades in your field of endeavor, but just as there is always some sort of balance in everything, there is balance in these things also.

Ask a celebrity what the down side is to their fame and they are bound to tell you that it’s the loss of privacy. Ask a professional athlete the downside to their fame and they might tell you that they feel the constant responsibility of being someone’s hero or at the least the pressure to stay in top physical shape so that they can perform.

Sometimes we choose careers that put us in the forefront of an organization, that make us the person that, in a way, personalizes a larger entity. Our job might include a number of different facets but to the public, we symbolize, we put a face on that which is faceless. Hopefully, we are well compensated for that responsibility because it costs us a certain amount of anonymity as well as a loss of privacy. Another thing it most likely costs us is the ability to openly express all of our personal views.

The reason for that is because no matter how much we decry that our views do not reflect the views of the organization we represent, our views hold more sway because the public sees a thick cord of connection between our personal opinion and that of the organization that we represent.

Recently a gentleman named Bernie expressed his support for a particular presidential candidate, he did this publicly in a news conference. Why would some guy named Bernie warrant a news conference? Because he is the president of a prominent university. If he was just a guy on the street, his opinion would mean no more than anyone else’s but he is not just a guy on the street, and that’s why his opinion ended up in the newspaper.

No matter what he prefaces his remarks with, Bernie Machen, almost as much as Albert the Alligator, represents the University of Florida. That is his job and he is well compensated for it. It comes with a number of perks but it also comes with a number of responsibilities. What he says publicly, in a newspaper, reflects on the University of Florida as a whole.

What he says in his living room or even at a party with friends is his own but what he says in a public forum which recognizes him only for his connection to the University of Florida, is an unstated endorsement of a presidential candidate by the University of Florida, no matter what such remarks are prefaced by.

I agree that in this particular circumstance, it sucks to be him but in most of the rest of his job, he has a pretty sweet deal.

Sometimes patriotism has little to do with current government or current governmental ideas but instead a remembrance of those that went before, those ideals that originally mirrored those of its citizens.