benja22

On Saturday, November 24th, 2007 the #2 Kansas University Jayhawks will battle the #3 Missouri Tigers in NCAA football. This is a game of great significance, not just for the NCAA, the Big Twelve Conference or for college football. This is a game of great significance for America and yes, all mankind.

This is not just a football game but a battle between good and evil.

To fully understand the importance of this game, you need to know some history.

In the 1850’s and 1860’s the hateful and murderous people of Missouri hated the good people of Kansas. Kansans, even before Kansas became a state of this great land, believed in the words of The Declaration of Independence. ” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.

Missourians, uneducated barbarians that they were, could not abide by a people who would not enslave and oppress the dark skinned people among them. To these evil Missourians, this was an unbearable sin.

It can be said that a great majority of these ruffians were only ignorant and poor mountain people who could never have afforded slaves of their own. It was the wealthy, educated, slave owning University of Missouri (founded in 1839) graduates who stirred these peoples hatred to a boil and then organized them into vicious murdering marauders.

These hateful men sent their ruffians across the border into Kansas to disrupt elections and cause chaos. In 1856 the evil pro-slavery vigilantes led by the traitorous renegade Sheriff Samuel J. Jones burned the Free-State Hotel, destroyed the equipment of two anti-slavery newspapers, and looted several other businesses in an attack known as the sack of Lawrence.

Historians, like to appear unbiased  so they like to say that the Jayhawkers did some stuff against the murderous Missourians as well. They point to minor and insignificant events of a few intoxicated Jayhawkers getting a little rowdy in little towns with nothing much to do. They try to inflate these events by giving them names such as “the September 1861 Sacking of Osceola” and other such nonsense.

Anti-Slavery groups of the era did put advertisements in eastern newspapers which encouraged good, hard working people to come to Kansas to start families and farms and support the right of all men to be free. This project of appealing to the goodness of hard working men was a great success and many anti-slavery supporters moved to Kansas from Ohio and points east.

On August 21, 1863, the horse thief William Clarke Quantrill brought his bushwhackers to Lawrence Kansas (home of the future University of Kansas) and began the slaughter of the good and peaceful people there. A massacre of over 200 men, women and children.

Quantrill died in 1865 having failed in his attempt to create the hatred he longed for in Kansas. Only a few of his followers remained after his death, most notably, the murdering robbers Frank and Jesse James.

The University of Kansas was founded in that same year as an institution of higher learning.

Twenty six years later the universities of Kansas and Missouri began playing football against each other (and even later, basketball, after the KU basketball coach, James Naismith, invented it). After 116 years the football series is led by Kansas 54-52-9 according to Kansas and tied at 53-53-9 according to Missouri. No, we can’t agree on the record.

The hatred continues. Norm Stewart, the Missou basketball coach from 1967 until 1999, is known to have not brought his team across the border until two hours before game time. Coach Stewart claimed this was because he didn’t want anyone on his team to spend a single dime in the state of Kansas. It should be noted that this tactic also prevented anyone on his team from touring Lawrence and learning the awful truth.

Many will turn on the game and see a cross border football rivalry. I see it for what it is. An eternal struggle between good and evil.

So I say to you good people,

“Rock Chalk Jayhawk!”