Detroit Free Press

Maybe they're trying to be nice.Maybe they need a bigger vocabulary.But have you noticed how the broadcasters for these NCAA tournament games seem hesitant to call things as they really are -- especially if they are the slightest bit ...negative?Example: A player dribbles the ball off his foot, then bounces it off his head, then runs the wrong way and shoots at the opposite basket.Announcer: "He's struggling today."Example: Team A falls behind by 30 points. Team A hasn't made a basket since last week. There are four minutes left.

They called it "getting the wood." It was a paddle or a stick several inches thick, and the coach gave it to you smack across the butt, sometimes alone in his office, sometimes in front of the whole team. The number of whacks depended on what you did, and how badly you did it.Joel (Tony) Blankenship got the wood in his day. He attended Detroit's Murray-Wright High School in the late '80s. He took his whacks, like most of his teammates. It never bothered him or scarred him emotionally. Parents didn't complain.

My sister married a wonderful guy. His father was a Hungarian Jew. During World War II, he and his eight brothers and sisters were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Some were killed in gas chambers. Others were put on a boat that was deliberately sunk.By the war's end, my brother-in-law's father was the only one left. For years, his wife would find bread stuffed under his pillow, a habit from Nazi starvation.Every now and then some nut case says the Holocaust was faked. Usually, you dismiss him as pathetic.

It's back-to-school time, friends, and that can mean only one thing: lawsuits.This one comes from the Houston area, where a mother felt compelled to explore legal action after enrolling her child in kindergarten only to find that -- gasp! -- the school had a dress code.One of those dress code limitations -- along with no ripped clothing, no halter tops and no gang-related items -- was no earrings for boys.For girls, earrings were OK.Therein lies the problem.

For almost as long as there has been war, there have been letters home. The image is usually of a weary soldier, huddled over a light, scribbling words to his family or fiancee, trying to be brave.

If you look carefully during these Pistons playoff games, you will observe a small but remarkable ritual.After every buzzer, as the Pistons head back to the floor, reserve Danny Manning, once the greatest college basketball talent in the nation, taps fists with each man to urge them on."It's the only way I feel part of the game," he says. "It's like a little bit of electricity passes through them to me."

The new war began with pictures of smoke, mushrooming smoke, billowing clouds of smoke, smoke that rose above the busiest skyline in the busiest city in the busiest nation in the world, yellow smoke and white smoke and a deathly shade of gray smoke. Smoke filled with jet fuel, with the debris of airplanes, with the shattered glass of two of the tallest buildings in the world, with the charred flesh of victims, smoke filled with what used to be a uniquely American attitude, one that said, "We are safe here, we are the biggest, the richest, the proudest, so we are the most secure."

Shrugging is not an option.You can blame the CIA and demand an investigation or you can blame President George W. Bush and demand his accountability. But you cannot shrug. You cannot walk away. You cannot say, "Oops." Not unless you're the kind of person who sees a dead man in the street and steps over him.That's not the kind of person I am. And that's not the country I live in.