Editor,
UNM soccer player Elizabeth Lambert made Time Magazine’s Top 10 Pariahs, along with Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom, and Bernie Madoff.
While Lambert’s actions were reprehensible, the appropriate discipline was meted out and we need to place the whole matter into perspective, relative to some of the others on the list.
Lambert’s actions took place amidst an already heated physical contest with a conference rival. We watch football players cheap shot, trip, hold and brawl constantly. Dallas Cowboys lineman Flozell Adams, for example, tripped a New York Giants defensive lineman, Justin Tuck, who spent the rest of game wearing a sling and reportedly had a partially torn labrum. Adams was fined by the NFL, end of story. He did not make ESPN or Sports Illustrated or Time as a villain.
Ohio State coach Woody Hayes was fired as coach after punching Clemson linebacker Charlie Bauman after Bauman intercepted a pass from Ohio State quarterback Art Schlichter. In 1983, Hayes was invited to dot the “i” in Script Ohio, at an Ohio State band ceremony; spoke at the school in 1984 on behalf of President Reagan’s re-election campaign and gave the commencement speech in 1986. After the whole incident with Bauman and the subsequent firing, Hayes was treated with even more idolatry in Columbus than he was as head coach, not put in Time Magazine as a pariah.
Bernie Madoff was responsible for the theft of tens of billions of dollars in private investor wealth in a Ponzi scheme that spanned over a decade, if not more. He was a serial con man who preyed upon not only private investors and Hollywood hot shots but his own people, preying upon Jewish charities and investors such as the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation and Steven Spielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation.
Nadya Suleman irresponsibly had eight children on top of six other children she had previously, though she had no job or means to support her existing kids. The home she lived in with her mother was in mortgage default. Yet, she had eight additional kids, creating a 14-child household.
These peoples’ actions will negatively affect more people than Liz Lambert’s foolish acts. Fourteen children, thanks to a situation that Suleman has created, will unduly burden California’s already stretched-thin public assistance system. The long-term prognosis will likely be just as bleak.
Liz Lambert simply committed a stupid act and the coaches have disciplined her appropriately. Her acts impacted a small group of individuals: UNM women’s soccer and the individual BYU players she tangled with. The acts of Bernie Madoff affected all who invested with him and represented the decline of standards and ethics in finance and investment services that has occurred for over two decades and was one act in the tragedy called the “Meltdown.” Nadya Suleman’s actions will adversely affect the taxpayers of an already overburdened state on the verge of collapse.
Time’s list shows a lack of context or perspective and represents the further decline of American prestige.
Brandon Curtis
UNM Alumnus
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
