There's No Atmosphere on the Moon

In making this post, I'm going against one of my blogging rules, which reads: The Blogger Shall Never Post About Sports. It's nothing personal, folks. Please allow me to make that quite clear to all of you rabid sports fans out there. Admittedly, I have already broken this rule once this year already. What's once more?

Readership, you must understand that I feel that sports are a fun distraction from the increasingly heavy, negative times in which we live, but neither by any stretch of the means do I think that they're a matter of vital importance. Any sort of congressional investigation of sports is time wasted which could be spent on much better things. To wit, this is one of those times where I feel compelled to speak not because I find it important, but because so many other people find it important. Here, yet another lesson in safe logic.

The moral lesson to be pulled from this mess of across the board flagrant usage of steroids by Major League Baseball players seems to be cut and dried. This is the price we pay for coddling and vastly overpaying an elite group of prima donnas who play a child's game for a living. Can anyone really be surprised? Am I saying anything particularly new or novel when making this statement, the general sentiment of which must be on the lips of so many people at this exact instant.

Over the past thirty years it has been well-documented how the price of a ticket, parking, concessions, and souvenirs have risen to obscene levels. Why anyone would wish to pay $6 for a 50 cent cup of stale tap beer or shell out $35 for a replica jersey of one's favorite player is beyond me. Why we would want to pay so dearly for our entertainment is still another, and reveals rather pointedly that we must be desperate to escape our humdrum existence of day to day living. Perhaps this is a fallacy of the human condition, albeit one that can be easily addressed in the name of personal responsibility but only as long as we, individually, make the effort.

Still, one can't help recalling that it did not use to be this way. Forty years ago baseball players made a decent leaving at the sport but certainly not enough by salary alone to constitute extreme wealth. It could easily be argued that domineering owners were the ones who profited most and made pots full of money off the backs of their players. The move to correct this and spread the wealth out more equitably amongst all those involved went way too far in the other direction. I often make a point that this is one of the paradoxes of human behavior. The pendulum never seems to reach happy medium point, but instead swings from pole to pole.

Here's what I propose and do take this with as many grains of sand as you wish. I would recommend highly that everyone should undertake and put into action the lost art of creating something worthwhile and substantive, or at minimum adding something intrinsically positive to the world. Doing so has always been a far more satisfying endeavor than passively watching any ballgame for me, at least. By "creating", allow me to expand the definition to include many things. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. Talk to an old friend. Read a book. Exercise. Make something with your hands.

Sports have their place in society. They can be remarkably unifying, egalitarian, and cross-cultural. They are a fun outlet and a hobby for many people. However, like everything else in this world, taken to excess they are damaging.

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Read the Full Report, here.