by Ernie McCray
One of my favorite athletes is Caster Semenya.
As a former half-miler I love the way she comes off that last 200, so strong, yet relaxed, at a pace the other runners totally lack.
As we used to say: “She can step, Jack!”
But people in the world of track have barred her from running track – unless she undergoes surgery or takes drugs to regulate her high testosterone levels – to “level the playing field,” not taking into consideration that, no matter how they feel, Caster Semenya is still a woman.
Spelled “W-O-M-A-N.”
And instead of some international federation trying to humiliate her and invalidate who she is as a human being, they should just suck it up and acknowledge that fact.
I mean Caster didn’t go off in some back alley, wearing shades, looking over her shoulder, and exchange some cash for a bag of steroid hormones that could make her run like the wind.
No. She was given her talent naturally, making her a gift of nature actually. And the women she competes against just happened to come along at the same time a once in a lifetime phenom arrived on the scene, running in ways, up to her arrival, no one had ever seen – as her natural self.
What’s happened to her is an example of how heterosexuals deem themselves as the “bee’s knees’ and “cat’s meow,” God’s people of the human universe, and see every other form of sexuality as “abnormal,” “unnatural.”
Oh, we human beings are such deniers of nature and that’s not a good sign for natural beings.
And this injustice that’s being done so openly for all the world to see is a strong indicator that we human beings are, generally speaking, not in tune with nature at all. How we’re acting during a pandemic is more than proof of that.
But we need to know that, although we tend to ignore nature’s wonders, Mother Nature is not ignoring us and she’s acting according to our demands of her. Wildly effectively.
We’ve said to her “Hey, we like our fossil fuel. It’s been great for our way of life.”
And she’s responded with deadly heatwaves that have caused the highest world temperatures ever, each year hotter than the last.
On a roll, she can’t help but create drought and set off forest fires every summer that are becoming increasingly difficult to put out and spin tornadoes here and there and around and about.
And neither can she resist unleashing record numbers of hurricanes (so many they’re running out of names) and causing the ices to melt and the rivers to rise with the help of powerful torrential rains that flood more and more terrain…
And because of how nature works this is not about to ever stop, at least not at any time soon.
And it’s our descendants down the line, our children and their children and their children and their children who will forever have to seek ways to slow it down.
And they won’t be able to get this task done if they don’t allow brilliant minds to rise up and shine and lead the way to our species survival – and this can’t happen if they continue down the paths past generations have trod of dividing themselves by color and sex and sexuality and a sundry of other non-life-affirming segregations.
They have to create a society where somebody like Caster Semenya is accepted for who and what she is: an extraordinary middle-distance runner – prone to producing high levels of testosterone.
Someone who is simply a gift of nature.
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