Lin-sanity and Insanity

If you are not a pro-basketball fan, you may not be aware of who Jeremy Lin is. Well, maybe you would have to not be a sports fan at all. Jeremy Lin is the shooting star of the New York Knicks, whose rise to stardom happened just this month.

Lin is a six-foot, three inch pro-basketball player who has an Asian heritage. Though he was born in America, his parents emigrated here from Taiwan in the 1970’s. His facial features quite readily reveal his ancestry; his height does not. Both of his parents are only five-foot, six inches tall.

Though he has been a talented basketball player, he has not been viewed as a great basketball player. He has spent most of his professional basketball career in the development league. Even when being acquired by the Knicks, he was not considered a starter, but a good addition to the depth of their bench. But then, in a series of games where he played quite impressively, he gained and has maintained a starting slot with the Knicks. After putting up a game-winning, three-pointer against the Toronto Raptors on Valentine’s Day, another pro-basketball player began running around shouting “Lin-sanity!”. The term has stuck. It’s official. Court battles over the ownership of the term now rage.

That is Lin-sanity. Now I want to talk about the Insanity attached to this. The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company put out an ice cream flavor they named Lin-sanity. One of the ingredients was broken up pieces of fortune cookies. A few people complained to the company that this was racially insensitive, so they removed the fortune cookies and have given broken up waffle cone pieces on the side to appease the complainers.

Of course, the company denies that the complaints were the reason for the recipe change. They said that the fortune cookies got soggy in the ice cream. Well, MAYBE. I am betting that they caved to political correctness gone wild. To be sure, our insane world contains many racially prejudiced, racially insensitive people, but it most certainly has as many who are racially overly-sensitive.

On MLK Day, I had a personal experience with this. That day I posted on Facebook what was supposed to be a bit of dry humor. I predicted that there would be no bank robberies in Tulsa that day. All that was in my mind was, there would be no bank robberies because no banks were open on the holiday. This innocent post, however, turned into a firestorm of controversy in which it was stated or implied that I was racially insensitive at best and perhaps a real racist at worst for making such a post. I suppose I should have waited to make the post on President’s Day, but I am so un-racist as to even imagine someone would make the illogical leap that my post was racial in any way.

Since the dismaying conflict of that day, the man who originally wrongly interpreted my post and attacked me, apologized. Sincerely apologized. I have forgiven all that, yet it stands as a very personal reminder that racism is quite alive in my world and it is a quite complex issue. It is absolutely not a concept restricted to white people holding bad attitudes toward white people.

I think, if I had been in charge of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, I would have been even more determined to keep the fortune cookies in the recipe. If the fortune cookies becoming "soggy" was a real issue, I would have told my workers to figure out how to solve that problem. And to anyone who called or wrote in protest of the fortune cookies, I would have this simple message: Get a freakin’ life!