A prom queen and World Peace

The perpetual beauty queen cliché says all she wants is world peace.

Really? Probably not if she is speaking of Metta World Peace, at least not today.

Metta, as we shall call him, is the Los Angeles Lakers power forward once known as Ron Artest. It doesn’t take a math major, as Artest once was at St. John’s University in Queens, to calculate an answer to why he chose such a name. Perhaps it is irony, but it is of little wonder to those whose minds run cynical.

The NBA handed the once Ron Artest of the Indiana Pacers an 86-game suspension in 2004 because he jumped into an Autumn Hills, Mich., crowd and began beating upon Detroit Pistons fans. Bad boy, bad boy, what’cha gonna do … ? Artest, or so my cynicism says, did what any great athlete who wants to keep his day job does. He transforms into a saint doing charity work. After all, “Metta” is a Buddhist term for loving-kindness.

Unfortunately, the 6-foot, 7-inch, 260-lb. Laker might have ignored “Good St. Metta” poised on his left shoulder — visible only to World Peace — opting instead for “Mean St. Metta” on his right. Metta says it was an accidental blow Sunday night when his elbow decked Oklahoma City’s James Harden. The Thunder’s guard suffered a concussion, which World Peace said happened, when his elbow slipped after a celebratory chest thump. Loving? Kindness?

Well, that just kind of stinks, provided World Peace intentionally elbowed Harden into a concussion.

Metta will likely receive a suspension but a real, sort of, beauty queen may receive more severe punishment. No, she wasn’t wishing for world peace, not even Ron Artest Metta World Peace. Actually, she wasn’t even a beauty queen but rather a prom queen. Hey it’s a queen! At least it wasn’t RuPaul.

It was one of those heart-warming stories I see every Saturday and Sunday evening on the local TV news where the one reporter working that day apparently has to cover every fund-raising, analeptic that will fill the 10-minute hole of “newscast.”

A 19-year-old Angie Gomez of the El Paso suburb of Horizon City claimed she was dying of cancer and managed to collect more $17,000 in donations.  Gomez professed that she had only six months to live. Angie also said she had to miss her high school prom because of cancer treatments. Her classmates were so touched they threw a prom for her which did double duty as a fundraiser. There turned out to be a problem, however. The prom queen wasn’t sick with cancer.

Wait, it’s a miracle!

It isn’t a miracle that she was charged with felony theft. It is strange that her mother didn’t know about the “extent of the fundraising,” according to numerous stories today. What does that mean? What did her mother know and when did she know it? I mean, the El Paso Times ran a story and everything! Well, maybe her Moms doesn’t read the paper.

What a wonderful world full of inspiring people. It’s enough to make one want to wish for, well, maybe not world peace but perhaps a little karma.