Frozen in the past

 You can't legislate the asshat out of people. Enlightenment, and simple human decency, has to come from within, not to get all Dalai Lama on ya or anything.

And so the other day I was watching that viral YouTube clip of Jacob Panetta of the ECHL's  Jacksonville Icemen making a monkey gesture at South Carolina defenseman Jordan Subban, who is black and the brother of the NHL's PK Subban. And it took me right back.

What's it been now? Twenty, 25 years?

Memory fails. But it doesn't fail enough that I don't remember the fans in Indianapolis dangling bananas over the glass to taunt the Fort Wayne Komets' Steve Fletcher all those years ago.

And so it goes, and so it goes. Dismayingly so.

You'd think in 2022 people would be better, the way Star Trek imagined humans would be in its hopeful vision of mankind's future. That seems impossibly quaint now, of course. We're still, some of us, the same bunch of racist s***heads we've always been.

Hence Panetta and his monkey gesture, a timelessly vile meme. If you watch the vid, you can also hear the fans chanting the n-word at Subban -- lineal descendants, as it were, of the fans in Indy with their bananas.

And ain't that charming.

The Icemen, God bless 'em, did what they could. They cut Panetta with blinding speed, just as the San Jose Barracuda of the AHL immediately suspended forward Krystof Hrabik after he made the same monkey gesture at another black player, Boko Imama. It's safe to say neither Panetta nor Hrabik will ever find gainful employment in professional hockey again.

I wish I could also say this means we'll never see the Subbans and Imamas subjected to racism on the ice again. But I can't.

We live in a world, after all, where a member of congress (the sensationally knuckleheaded Lauren Boebert) can openly slur Muslim colleague Ilhan Omar, snidely wisecracking that she wasn't scared of Omar because "she wasn't wearing a backpack" -- a broad hint that Omar, because she's Muslim, is probably a terrorist. Because, you know, they all are.

And Boebart's fellow Republican congress critters? Did they publicly reprimand her?

Oh, hell no. They just shrugged. 

Boebart's constituents, meanwhile, no doubt chuckled, and will now vote for her even more enthusiastically.

I'd like to think otherwise. But I see the Former Guy eagerly stoking white resentment over imagined wrongs, and I see his acolytes following suit just as eagerly, and ...

And, well. This ain't Star Trek's America, boys and girls. Let's just say that.

Now, maybe that's just the natural pessimist coming out in me. But you know what?

Looks to me like it's not just hockey that's frozen in the past.