Last year there was an ad on during the SuperBowl. It was about ‘running like a girl.’ #likeagirl And the ad ends with a young woman asking, “Why can’t ‘like a girl’ also mean ‘win the race’?”
The commercial spoofed the stereotype that girls can’t run. When I was growing up, it was an insult to “run like a girl.” Think about that.
Sometimes, doing things the way we do them, ‘like a girl,’ is perfectly fine, yet being ourselves -doing things our way – still takes courage. We must do things that require courage. We must be unconventional.
I’m going to tell you a little story.
This is about a girl who liked to play a lot of two-hand touch football with her brothers and cousins. Her Uncle Tom Nierman was a great coach in Park Ridge, Illinois. Tim, her friend, who went on to play college football and become a coach himself, said Mr. Nierman was the best coach he ever had. Uncle Tom was patient, kind, and smart. But, he still needed to learn things, when he made a great big mistake at a Thanksgiving party in 1972.
See, Uncle Tom was throwing a nerf football around the dining room to only the boys. But one girl jumped in, intercepted a pass, and caught the ball. Yes. A girl.
“Hey, you’re pretty good. Too bad you’re a girl. And you can’t play football,” Uncle Tom said.
“I can play,” the girl said.
“No you can’t. But just to prove it — If you want to try out tomorrow for the team, you can. But I won’t give you any special consideration, because you’re a girl or because you’re my niece,” he said. “Don’t feel bad if you get cut — after all, only half of the boys who try out make the cut.”
So this girl showed up with her little brother John to try out for the Mighty Might football team, the Vikings. She was very scared. But she did not show it.
She did her very best. There were tires on the ground and she hiked up her knees and hopped in and out of the tires. And there was a catching challenge. And she caught it just like she always did when playing with her brothers or her cousins – one hand on top, one hand on the bottom of the ball. And then, she hugged the ball to herself and ran fast. Faster than most of the boys.
She played her heart out. She even got to throw the ball a few times; she jerked it back next to her ear just like she always did. Because, you see, she played like a girl – a fast, athletic, capable girl.
After the tryout, when her father picked her and her brother up from the tryout, she told him that she and John had done well. She felt proud. She felt like a winner.
And that night they got a phone call. The girl made the team, but her little brother John didn’t. (In fairness to John, he did not make the age cut off. It had nothing to do with his ability.) But she never went on to play in a team. She just wanted to prove that she could. And she did.
And that girl was me. So, never say, a girl can’t play football, because she can.
When I was a girl, schools did not really implement Title IX yet. You know what that is, right? It’s a law that says public schools have to give equal funding to girls’ sports as boys’. And, when I was little, there were other ways that schools weren’t fair. For example, I loved wood shop, but I could only take shop one quarter of the year and I had to take cooking and sewing for the other three quarters. But I loved wood shop! And I wanted to take plastics too — and make those cool, bright-colored keychains.
That didn’t seem right. So in middle school, I ran for and became the first girl president of Lincoln Junior High School in Park Ridge, Illinois. I’m not sure if I made much of a difference. I hope that I did.
Although women were (and are) not represented very well in the government in the U.S., in many countries, half of the elected officials are women. In churches too, we have come a long way, but we still have a ways to go. As a girl, I attended Saint Joan of Arc school in Skokie, Illinois and I could not be an Altar Boy. In Communion class, I recall asking the priest, “Why can’t women be priests?” And I’m still asking that.
So my message is: we must judge one another on the content of our characters and not on the way we look or the perceived limitations of our genders.
We can do better. We must do better.
Girls are just as good as boys.
Do not judge a book by its cover.
In Middle School English class, we talked about how cool it is when a character is not how they, at first, appear. Like Chewbacca in Star Wars. How does he look? Big, scary, mean? But you couldn’t have a better friend — a gentle giant.
Dr. Martin Luther King talked about this in a sermon that is often called “A Tough Mind, A Tender Heart.” He talked about a creative solution to resist inequality.
Dr. Martin Luther King said:
Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the political officials and protectors of the old order. He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. So he said to them, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the mist of wolves.”
And he gave them a formula for action, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but this is what Jesus expects. We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
That was what Dr. King said. We must have soft hearts. We must give everyone a chance and we must be aware of the potential in everyone. We must encourage everyone. We must ask, Why? Why can’t we all be equal? Why can’t we have equity? Why should we not denigrate someone for how they look? For their ability? Or whether they are a boy or girl or non-binary? Or an immigrant? Or have a different family history than ours?
What can we do? Resist the status quo. Do not become lazy or timid when you hear someone put someone else down. Call it out. Like, when you hear a boy call another boy ‘a girl’ as an insult.
And this goes for ourselves too. Lift yourself up. Do not put yourself down.
I tell you: be more loving. To each other and to ourselves. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that. So did Jesus. Dr. King said we have to love everyone, even those who were hating on us. He said, “Through nonviolent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system.”
In other words, love the hater but reject the system that encourages hate.
At the end of his sermon, Dr. King said,
When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of a strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance. When days grow dark and nights grow dreary, we can be thankful that our God combines in God’s nature a creative synthesis of love and justice that will lead us through life’s dark valleys and into sunlit pathways of hope and fulfillment.
I want to end with one more upshot to my brief career as a football player. After that Vikings football season, between fifth and sixth grade, I took a summer school class on newspaper reporting. I wrote about my experience playing football. And a lot of other kids, and even a few teachers and parents, said they saw my article in the school paper and they liked it. It made them think. And that summer school class probably inspired me to continue to write for and edit school newspapers, and, years later, to become a professional writer.
I realized that writing was a way to change people’s minds – and I would not have known that, had I not tried out for the football team and written about it. So take a risk, try something new. And if you are, like I was, good at football, it doesn’t mean you can’t try something new too. Maybe even knit or crochet? When I was a girl, there was a football player named Rosie Grier and he was a writer too, He wrote a book, “Needlepoint for Men.”
Rosie Grier was unconventional. So was I. So was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus. And guess who else? Kamala Harris is unconventional — like a serpent and a dove. And, I ask, why can’t ‘run like a girl’ mean ‘win the race’?
Just for today, try being unconventional too.
This is a slightly updated version of a chapel talk I gave to middle school students after Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in January of 2017. At St. David’s chapel talks, teachers, every school day, gave an inspiring 10-minute talk.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 