I am sure you have all seen the news headlines over the last couple of weeks about Arkansas Razorback head football coach Bobby Petrino and his motorcycle accident. To make a long story short, Petrino wrecked his bike with a recently hired 25-year-old female who was not his wife. After initially lying about the accident, the truth soon came out that not only was this woman not his wife, but she was recently hired by Petrino as the student-athlete development coordinator for the Razorbacks.

What bothers me about this story is not that a successful coach messed up in his personal life or that he was fired from his head coaching position, but that the whole country is so wrapped up in it. I am not saying this story is not newsworthy, because it definitely is, but let’s face it, infidelity happens all the time. Infidelity is a terrible thing and I am certainly not trying to make light of it, but is it really that shocking that yet another person in the spotlight has been caught in an affair?

How different would the world be if we gave this kind of attention to things that actually mattered? What about the big issues like world hunger or preventable diseases or child labor? Or, if you want to keep it local, what about the fact that the American economy is still tanking yet the national debt is still rising? What if we gave the kind of attention we give to celebrities to issues that actually matter?

Imagine how different casual conversations would be. Instead of gossiping about trivial news, people would be talking about the big issues.

Can you imagine how many people would actually be influenced to get up and do something about world hunger or the AIDS epidemic taking over places like Africa?

Humankind could do miraculous things if we just focused our time and energy in the right places. The ideas that could be sparked during these casual conversations might just change the world. I can only hope that someday people will wake up to these issues that actually matter and stop spending so much time on ones that will be old news within a few months.

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