Monthly Archives: January 2013

Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers, Mike D'Antoni, NBA, Pau Gasol, Rasheed Wallace, Steve Nash

Ball Don’t Lie


Ready for an understatement?
This isn’t Showtime. And this isn’t fun.
This isn’t even the 2007-10 Los Angeles Lakers that made three straight trips to the finals and captured two NBA titles.
It’s a Hodge-podge group of veterans, past primes and no names. The Lakers have an egocentric star, and his name is not Kobe Bryant. Another player’s psyche is highly susceptible to breakdowns. Their coach has a warped sense of reality and apparently doesn’t see the roster like the rest of us does.
If this weren’t the Lakers, we’d ignore them, tell them to blow it up and check back in a year or two to see if they’ve made any progress.
But this is Los Angeles and these are the Lakers. The Yankees of the NBA. And drama and theater go hand-in-hand with the purple and gold.
The media will keep talking about them, but even Jack Nicholson’s waved the white flag.
The Los Angeles Lakers are a 16-21 team.
Can we stop talking about them now? If not, just let me know when, because it’s at that moment I’d love to talk about the NBA with you.
The most interesting, dynamic and contending team in Los Angeles is the Clippers. There’s a better story in terms of collapse in Boston with the Celtics. New York finally has a decent Knicks team. The Thunder are rolling in Oklahoma City, the Pacers have saved their season in Indiana, the Heat are bored in Miami and the Spurs keep fighting off father time in San Antonio.
But everywhere you turn it’s the Lakers, who frankly, just don’t matter. Lack of depth on the bench, old age on the court, chaos in the front office. Jim Buss is calling the shots, more and more frequently, if that tells you anything.
You already knew most of this. It’s nothing new. But for some odd reason, they won’t go away.
The players keep talking. Everyone involved is trying to stay relevant and pretend the Lakers matter right now. But it’s just an act.
Maybe it’s their coach, Mike D’Antoni, who continues to say outlandish things on a nearly daily basis. The man touted the return of Showtime when he took the job in November, promised things would get better when Steve Nash returned and just yesterday said the Lakers season was just starting.
D’Antoni has turned into a walking, mustachioed cliché. One game at a time? Season just starting? You’re 16-22! There’s just 45 games left in the season and it’s reasonable to suspect that in a difficult Western Conference, the Lakers need to go around 30-15 the rest of the way to make the playoffs.
Can this team win 30 of it’s remaining 45 games?
It can. But it won’t.
Which means all of this is just a sideshow. It’s window dressing on an embarrassing season. To preach to the masses to not give up hope is an affront to the masses. We all might not have made it to the NBA, but we can tell when we see a train wreck on the court and in the locker room.
We were asked to give it time, to exercise patience while this group figured it out. Many pointed to the way the Miami Heat started two years ago with Chris Bosh and LeBron James. By this point in the 2010-11 season, the Heat were winning games, not losing six straight. The Heat struggled with things like who’ll take the last shot. The Lakers struggle to get their shot at the end of games.
This isn’t a team that’s close, on the cusp and showing potential signs of greatness.
It’s a mediocre team. Kobe Bryant wants it, Dwight Howard just wants his. Steve Nash wants it, but can’t use it the way he used to. And Pau Gasol just wants to be wanted. There’s too much noise in Lakerland.  
Now, for all the poking and prodding on D’Antoni, what is it that I expect him to do? Hold pressers with a drink in his hand and say things like the uncle in Home Alone: “Horrible, just horrible.”
No, Mike D is doing just what anyone would, trying to paint a face of hope and optimism on a dire situation. And Kobe can tweet staged photos that make light of reports he and Dwight are sparring behind the scenes. And the Lakers can claim a 10-point home win over a 9-29 Cavs team is righting the ship.
They can do all those things. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. But it doesn’t mean we have to watch.
What do we typically do when we see a proverbial sports train wreck? We watch until it’s over. Well, this is over. We pay attention to things only as long as they are interesting. Most people pay attention to politics the six weeks to two months before an election. Within days of the election being over, we’re not watching Hardball, Morning Joe or CNN as much.
We needed to see how this would play out: Kobe, Nash and Howard on the same team. How it would go, what egos would get in the way, how they would run D’Antoni’s offense, if they complemented one another (both with their play and their words in the media).
We wanted to see if this was as fun as everyone said it would be (like on the NBA preview issue of SI, above).
It’s not.
And that’s the thing with sports, you watch until you’re spinning your wheels and wasting your time. We know what’s going to happen from here on out. Is success possible? Well, as Mike D and many of the Lakers players will try and tell you, anything’s possible.
Our eyes see a different story. And it’s just not one worth paying attention to. Let’s just close the curtain on this season and focus on other things, other storylines and teams that are worth our time.
Remember Rasheed Wallace’s famous line about how the “ball don’t lie”? Meaning, if you’re given the ball and you shouldn’t have been, the story will be told with the next shot. If it doesn’t go in, the ball told the truth. 
The ball isn’t lying on the Lakers season. Whether it’s turned over, bouncing off the rim and careening into the stands from a bad pass, the ball don’t lie.
And there’s no talking around that.
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Barry Bonds, Baseball Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball, Mark McGwire, MLB, Performance Enhancing Drugs, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Steroid Era

No Hall Pass


Here are your 2013 Major League Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, those who had careers that catapulted them to Cooperstown:
(Insert sound of wind, crickets or picture tumbleweed drifting through the Old West).
That’s right, no one was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, the first time since 1996 that’s happened. The lack of inductees – technically, there were three, but they all died in the 1930s and were elected by the veteran’s committee – means that it’s the first time since 1960 that the induction ceremony will include no new or living honorees.
If this isn’t a condemnation of performance enhancing drugs and the era of 1990s and early 2000s, I don’t know what is. The names are there: Mark McGwire,
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa. 
They are all floating out there, names as big as their arms and thighs and heads in the baseball world. 
The stats are there, too. Home runs, strikeouts, hits – record shattering accomplishments litter their resumes.
But something else is there, too.
The asterisk, the black mark, the whispers. The performance enhancing drugs.
I had a friend tell me recently that he didn’t care about the steroids. He wanted the juice dripping off the ball. If someone wanted to ‘roid out for his entertainment and smash the ball 500 feet to provide good theater, even if it wrecked the man’s body or health, then so be it.
And really, I’m not sure I care about that, either. Granted, health is an issue – but it’s their bodies, it’s their decision, it’s their long-term health. Who am I to tell them what they can and cannot do?
I’m much more concerned about how we view this as fans and mothers and fathers. We spend all of our time telling our children to work hard, then we allow others to cut-corners in life on the path to success and riches? If that’s a jealous comment, then fine, though it’s not intended to be.
Someone once asked me if I could have taken a few pills or injections back in high school that would have turned me into a D-1 college basketball player and future NBA star, would I take it. My answer was and remains: no. I want to always know what I did or didn’t get was solely based on my own merits. We’re already fighting advantages in sports and in life. Some people are smarter in general, others more methodical. Some are fast, some are slow. Short, tall, strong, lean. These can all be used as advantages and disadvantages.
The best are the ones that maximize what they have, they rise to the top. If you have a Hall of Fame, it does imply these are the best, the ones to strive for and mimic and be like. They are the standard.
Who wants that standard mixed with performance enchancers? Many would argue that why wouldn’t you want to improve your performance, in whatever realm you do it? I’ve got no problem with supplements and vitamins and flu shots – things that prevent and fill in gaps I can’t get from food. Optimal nutrition. New ideas in the realm of sleep, rehab, surgery and nutrition are all good.
But if you’re in a controlled group where 50-60 percent of the people are doing one thing and 40-50 percent are doing another, that taints your sample and your results. How can you compare the two? How do you know, specifically, who was doing what?
Steroids don’t allow you to hit the ball, that still takes practice. But it does allow you quicker bat speed – not in a natural way. HGH doesn’t make you better, it just helps you recover from injury faster than the other guy.
But we’re not even really debating all that today, are we?
The question is, what to do with those that we know or suspect did use these drugs and enhancers? Do we place them among the other baseball legends who accomplished their now broken records without those items? What does it say about us – and more importantly – to our young athletes if we do?
The criticism of the writers for failure to elect anyone is so misguided. Attacking the system and who votes and elects members is diverting attention away from the real conversation.
Which, essentially, is simple. You can keep the money you made entertaining us, the fame given by us and all the trophies you were awarded, but you will not be permitted to be forever remembered and represented as a standard-bearer of what we want our athletes to achieve. 
Forget separate wings of the Hall, the conversation about the character clause. I don’t care if half the players in the Hall of Fame were jerks, they didn’t disrespect the game itself. You did. If Pete Rose doesn’t get in for gambling on baseball, you don’t get in for cheating your peers in baseball.
Barry Bonds wants us to turn the page, to stop being angry. OK, we have. Now what? Well, we just sent you the message: Go away.
It’s that simple, we’ll move on when you move on. You’re not getting in.
We won’t forget you, but you won’t be remembered with a bust, either. 
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Alabama football, BCS National Championship, Bear Bryant, Brian Kelly, Lynard Skynard, NCAA College Football, Nick Saban, Notre Dame

The Song of Saban


In the aftermath of “The Beating”, as a crystal football was held high into the warm winter air of Miami, the sound of Lynard Skynard’s ode to Alabama oozed out of the speakers in Sun Life Stadium.
“Sweet Home Alabama” was a befitting end to this night, this season.
No. 2 Alabama (13-1) defeated No. 1 Notre Dame (12-1) by a lopsided score of 42-14 to claim the 2012 National Championship and the school’s third national title in four years. It marked the Crimson Tide’s 15th National Championship in football (the school’s count), and for head coach Nick Saban, his fourth, cementing the claim to a dynasty.
By dominating this game in every fashion, it bolstered the crystal-clear notion that the Alabama Crimson Tide are the quintessential historic college football team. Not Notre Dame, not USC, not Texas. Never has a school and a sport meant so much to its fan base, to its state and to a region.
In hindsight, it would appear we all got a little carried away with this one. From breaking down the matchup in ways that gave Notre Dame a puncher’s chance to comparing this historic matchup with each school’s respective counterparts from years gone by.
Let’s just settle this: there will never be another Bear Bryant, another Knute Rockne. Between the Houndsooth Hat and the Galloping Ghosts, this matchup represented history on paper. Forrest Gump versus Rudy. But no hype machine on earth can make this 1973 or 1966. Rudy was an underdog. Forrest was an All-American with blazing speed. Gump was greater than Rudy on this night.
Run, Forrest, run.
But the sequence of plays that lead to “The Beating” proved that aura and mystique only take you so far, for either school. You need speed. You need size. You need precision.
Brian Kelly is a fine football coach, and as a lifelong fan of the Fighting Irish, I’m happy to have him. He’s just what was needed to restore this program to relevancy. And he has. A 12-0 undefeated regular season against a better schedule than people want to give credit for is way more than I expected this season – or frankly any of the next three seasons.
Yet there remains a vast difference between relevancy and relevant. Being in the conversation is not the same as being the center of the conversation. Notre Dame accomplished getting into the former, while Alabama has and is the latter.
When a football team and its fan base remains largely stuck in its past, as Notre Dame has, something has to change. You cannot get young high schoolers who weren’t even born the last time Notre Dame won the national title (1988) to commit based on its tradition and history. You have to show them something. And this is a fine start. This is where Alabama was five or six years ago, on the cusp of relevancy, struggling to maintain consistency.
For whatever it’s worth, Notre Dame deserved to be in this game. The only bowl-eligible undefeated team with wins over Stanford (who beat Oregon at Oregon and won the Rose Bowl) and at Oklahoma, as well as winning at USC (the preseason No. 1 team) was good enough to be selected for this game under this system. The outcome doesn’t prove Notre Dame was overhyped or fraudulent, it just proved Alabama was much, much better.
And therein is the major take away from this unruly affair: Alabama is vastly superior, vastly consistent and properly rated. As we debated over the past two weeks – following Florida’s embarrassing loss to Louisville and the SEC’s less than stellar bowl season showing – if the SEC was down and what that could potentially mean for the BCS title game, we forgot one thing: Alabama is different.
They are coached by Nick Saban, who’s been criticized by many, including me, as being an emotionless coaching droid. But what Saban’s lack of human emotion seems to stir in the rest of us really matters little; his results conjure all the emotional bond he needs with his players and fans. Take away those two lost seasons with the Miami Dolphins and the NFL, Saban’s won four national titles in eight years (he won one with LSU in 2003).
Who cares if Saban resembles the statue of himself outside Bryant-Denny Stadium – in more than just appearance – when he’s off the football field? Who cares if he allows himself and his staff just 48 hours to celebrate championships? And what does it matter if he enjoys a Gatorade bath like a cat enjoys being doused with water?
“Whether I look it or not,” Saban said following the game, “I’m happy as hell.”
Whether it matters or not, we shouldn’t care if he enjoys it. Why would Saban’s enjoyment of his life and accomplishments have any bearing on how we view them? Because we’re human, mostly. And we internalize these things and think, “Oh for pete’s sake, Nick, smile!” We would, right? If we were Saban, we’d be up there begging for more Gatorade to be dumped over our heads, for players to hug us and to sing our praises. We’d soak it all in and smile.
But we’re not Nick Saban.
I watched this game with my 10-year-old son, whom I’ve naturally and carefully crafted into a Notre Dame fan. Unsurprisingly, he went to bed in disgust in the middle of the third quarter. It was painful to watch, but only because – as I told him – the team had come so far and shown so little of what got them there. The hardest thing to do is reach the pinnacle and fall short of actually winning and celebrating.
It’s what we all dream of as kids and as adults, as fans. Those moments of cheering as the clock winds down, basking in the glow of success.
And perhaps that’s why we don’t understand Nick Saban. We’re all vastly different from him. And he’s very different from Bear Bryant. And its not the 1970s.
But maybe that’s why Nick Saban keeps on winning, because he’s different. He may not have the flair for the dramatic. He may not wear a Houndsooth Hat or have the Southern gentleman accent. 
He may not feel the glory of victory or the agony of defeat – which is what allows him to just keep going, keep working, keep pushing.
It’s what might make him the greatest college football coach of all-time, at least statistically, before it’s all said and done.
I just hope, for a moment, as the trophy was held there above his head late on a Monday night in Miami, he could hear the song coming out of the speakers and know that for an awful lot of people, it meant something to them.
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concussions, Dave Duerson, Dr. James Andrews, Matthew Broderick, Mike Shanahan, MLB, NFL, Robert Griffin III, Steven Strasburg, Washington Nationals, Washington Redskins

Sometimes, There Are No Winners


Here’s where we start: 60-year-old men who can’t walk, can’t turn the lights on inside their home and can’t stand the pain to the point that some commit suicide.
If that doesn’t grab your attention, I’m not sure what will. Maybe phrases. Brain damage. Multiple reconstructive surgeries. Cognitive breakdowns. Early onset dementia.
These are the real, live dangers of playing football for a sustained period of time in one’s life. Is it worth it?
How can a schlub like me proclaim to have that answer? I can’t, frankly. But the fundamental fact is that across America, mothers and fathers are struggling with how to take the new information on player safety and mesh it with what is best for our sons.
I have three boys. The oldest plays travel football for a good school system. The coaches are fantastic. The medical staff in our community is top notch. And the same could be said for the NFL. The Washington Redskins have Dr. James Andrews – yes, that Dr. James Andrews, he of renown surgical fame.
And Robert Griffin III is still hurt this morning and we’re still pondering if he should have been playing at all.
Part of this is our fault. As fans and media, we eviscerated Jay Cutler two years ago for not playing in the NFC Championship game against the arch-rival Green Bay Packers with a knee injury. We encourage gritty, tough, manly behavior in sports.
But I have to ask, is it manly to eat through a straw, have recurring headaches and forget your own name by the time your 55? Is it manly to walk with a gimp, hunched over and have knees and hips replaced in your 40s?
It’s an interesting dichotomy, to pair the decision of the Washington Redskins to play Griffin over the past month with the city’s baseball team, the Washington Nationals, polar opposite decision to rest the arm of their prized franchise player, Steven Strasburg. The Nationals faced backlash, including from me, for resting him during the final month of last season, just as the team was in the playoff race. And as the Nationals advanced into the playoffs, they refused to budge: Strasburg would not be pitching until 2013.
Strasburg fought this decision, but ultimately accepted it. Griffin, according to both he and his coach, was asked multiple times about staying in the game Sunday against Seattle. He played.
He got hurt.
As Griffin said in his postgame comments, and as other former players point out all the time, you take the risk of injury any time you step on the field. It is not a variable. It’s there. With baseball and basketball – heck, with walking down the street – the risk of injury is all around us. It’s just significantly less possible to get hurt walking down the street than it is playing baseball. Likewise, the gap is roughly the same between baseball and football.
It doesn’t make Griffin more of a leader or a man to play through pain. Or maybe it does to those other players, because they are doing it, too. Football is a different sport, with its own set of protocols and guiding principles. I enjoy what leadership and experience my son gets from football. But can he find it or learn it in other, less dangerous ways?
If this is where we are as a culture and society of sports fans – that a man is measured solely by pain tolerance and his ability to run around on one leg and fight through injury to lead his team – then we’ve advanced no further than the time of gladiators in ancient Rome.
We should be better than this by now. We’re an advanced race of people, with thousands of years of information at our fingertips. We speak of logic, yet confusingly do not show any on certain things.
Remember the 80s flick, WarGames? Matthew Broderick was caught hacking into a sophisticated computer system that interacted with you (basically, what we have now). At the time, this advanced system learned from itself. Eventually, it learned that Global Thermonuclear War could not be won, under any scenario, and eventually just asked to play chess (after scaring the pants of nearly everyone with security clearance).
I’m not suggesting we all just play chess. To be certain, there’s something endearing about the leadership qualities of Russell Crowe or Russell Wilson, when they keep going. You want to instill perseverance. As a father, I know I do. We love it in America when people keep pushing and going despite the odds, despite the injuries, despite the repercussions.
But you have to look at the culture we – all of us, fans, players, coaches, media – are creating. Is there truly a way to win this game when more and more former players end up not winning at the game of life? Substance abuse, violence, suicides; these are not things I want for my boys. I don’t want them to end up like Jim McMahon, who’s forgotten more about his professional football career than anyone who went by the name “Punky QB” ever should.
Griffin’s injury hasn’t sparked new conversation around head trauma or concussions, because it was his knee.
And this goes beyond giving his team the best chance to win over the backup. Was it best for him? Maybe not. Is it his choice or the teams? Perhaps both, in some way. Yet a friend of mine, who’s had five knee surgeries, three of which were of the reconstructive nature, commented how Griffin’s knee buckling didn’t, uh, look good. He would know – my friend’s injured knee came from football.
How will Griffin’s knee hold up over time? That’s not just the concern of the Washington Redskins or fans of RGIII or the NFL. That’s Griffin’s concern, too. And maybe he’s fine with it. He’s a grown man and has signed a contract to go between those lines each week. If he chooses to play on an injured knee that could lead to major obstacles in the ways he lives life after football is his decision in almost all ways.
And you know what’s ours? What we allow our sons to do, the generation of young boys between the ages of 6-13 who really can’t do anything if we don’t allow them to play.
It’s striking that so many former players have said they weren’t sure if they would allow their boys to play football. Kurt Warner caused a stir when he said he’d prefer his sons not play and nearly retired a year before he actually did when his teammate, Anquan Boldin, suffered a nasty concussion in a mid-air collision going after a ball Warner threw. Tom Brady’s father said he waited until he was 14 until he allowed one of the league’s greatest quarterbacks to play the game. All-pro linebacker Bart Scott said he plays football so his son “won’t have to” and Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw, who won four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers, said if he had a son he wouldn’t allow him to play.
It’s the totality of what we see – it won’t go away. Our gut instinct and reaction tell us that something is off. From former players struggling to cope (like Junior Seau or Dave Duerson) to current ones who struggle, too, we’re getting an all too clear picture of the vast differences between modern football and the game that was once played.
They are not gladiators, and this is not ancient Rome. Commendable, endearing and manly as it may be, it’s brutal and barbaric for us to ignore or subconsciously enjoy their suffering.
Are they well paid? Most certainly. But that money will be gone to prescription drugs and doctor appointments between the ages of 40 to 75. If they make it that long.
It’s one thing to watch it all unfold. It’s another to willingly and openly subject my own children to it. We’re supposed to learn from things. And I frankly can’t decide what I will do with my youngest two boys or how long our 10-year-old will play.
Because football is becoming more and more like a modern sports version of Global Thermonuclear War.
The only way to truly win is not to play. 
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American culture, American People., Fiscal Cliff, Gun Control, Hollywood, Sandy Hook Elementary, Society, United States

The Unused Power of the People


Much has been made of the now-averted “fiscal” cliff, but truthfully, we’ve gone off the selfish cliff.
From almost forgetting the horror of Sandy Hook to our resignation that it’s OK to raise taxes and spending as long as it’s not my taxes, we just don’t seem to care unless we are affected directly.

What will it take for us as a people to act? We have so much more power standing collectively than fighting as individuals.

Should someone come into your home and just grab whatever money you have in your wallet or purse each night? Would that do it? Would you feel violated? Outraged?
I know several friends and family members that are completely fine with the argument that the country’s wealthiest earners should pay more in income and payroll taxes.
“I don’t make over $400,000 a year,” said someone to me recently. “Why should it bother me? And those people should pay more.”
It should bother you, me and everyone because even though it’s not you this time, it will be next time. They’re coming for more money. And they start with the rich and work their way down the line.
See, the conversation and discussion is all wrong – this isn’t just about one economic group in this nation, it’s about all income levels. Whether you pay $150 in taxes or $1.5 million, where is every dollar going and why?
What we should be asking – no, demanding – from our elected officials is this: why is there a need to raise taxes on anyone? Why do you need more of our money? We can’t trust you with what you get from us now!
The package that was passed earlier this week to avert said “fiscal cliff” will add $4 billion in debt. How is that even possible? How do you raise taxes and over time still add that much money to the deficit? What’s worse is the deal made by Congress earlier this week was seen as a compromise – of course it was. Because they created this mess, let’s all congratulate them for averting disaster and putting off the debt ceiling conversation for three months.
Well done, guys and gals.
What if we all agreed to not vote for anyone, any incumbent, who contributes to raising the debt? We might get 100 new elected officials every year for the next four years, but we’d eventually find people who do what we want them to, right? Because as crazy as it sounds, that’s what our elected officials in Congress are there for – to do the will of the people. They represent us.
Except they don’t. They represent themselves and re-elections. And as for the “us”, well, we can’t get out of our own way and get our stuff together in terms of values, guiding principles and general decorum.  
There was an article posted late Monday night about how all the staffers and members of Congress had to order out and get pizza and wings on New Year’s Eve and how depressing that was.
I laughed because I thought it was the punchline of a joke. That’s not sad. Millions of Americans eat like that every New Year’s Eve – and not by choice. Millions of Americans work late into the night on a holiday because they get triple pay for overtime. We need more because now we give more than ever before in our history.
Meanwhile, we spend less time with family, with friends, with spouses.
This vacuum is why Facebook and Twitter exist. They keep us connected to the world when we’re so wrapped up in ours. Except they dehumanize our relationships, take the emotion out and make everything instant and matter of fact.
What do we get when we spend less time with our children? Or better yet, what do they not get from us? How about our spouses? Are marriages stronger? Relationships of any kind, when less time and energy and effort go into them?
And we ask ourselves how we ended up with the massacre of elementary school students? Shootings in a movie theater? High divorce rates? Rising debt? Unmotivated masses, shrinking more each day into their own bubbles.
Wake up! We are the problem. We don’t take the time to fix it. We talk about it on Facebook and Twitter or at our holiday parties and then we move on. Next issue. On to my personal problems, right?
Wake up! Is it going to take your child’s elementary school being unspeakably shaken by tragedy before something is actually done to protect them? I mean, I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, but I’m not sure why anyone needs to be able to buy a Rambo-style machine gun and as much ammo as they can fit in their car trunk.
But Congress can’t talk about that for a few more weeks because they’re “fixing” the “fiscal cliff” they created by mismanaging our money to begin with. So what makes us think these geniuses can fix something like coming up with a logical, modernized second amendment that while protecting the rights of citizens to arm themselves, won’t allow for them to pretend they are preparing for Red Dawn, Part II?
That debate that everyone said we needed to have on gun control lasted in the media for all of 10 days – right up until Christmas and Kim Kardashian announcing she was becoming Kayne West’s baby momma.
We’re running out of time, my friends. What our ancestors and American decendants worked so hard to build in terms of values is being short-sold by our own selfishness, obsession with the material and overall failure to act. We expect others to clean up these messes, but we don’t take action – or build sustained action – ourselves.
There is great power in the people – us, the collective whole that make up our society. If we can set aside these specific arguments, say on faith, tax brackets, marriages, for a brief moment and look at the bigger picture to unite under, we’ll have a greater success at reclaiming and reestablishing our guiding principles that sustain our first world way of life and the freedoms we so take for granted.
Is this the kind of world we want to live in or leave our children with?
Case in point: a recent pollsuggests a majority of Americans don’t feel it’s necessary for Congress to force Hollywood to produce less violence in their products. Yet when every fabric of our vast knowledge suggests that violence begets violence, especially when exposed to the young, why wouldn’t we want that? What if we absolutely forbade anyone under the age of 18 from seeing an R-rated movie, even with a parent?
Our collective selfish nature says we don’t want them to take away what we, as adults, enjoy so much. Do we? Because since Sandy Hook, I can’t watch a violent movie, kudos to you who can. It’s difficult to separate reality from art now. As I said then, everything is different – and it has to be. The very essence and core of our lives is at stake.
What are we doing? What’s it going to take? What will be our breaking point?
Because we are already, quite rapidly, defining our downfall.
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