Our Environment at Risk
October 18, 2011
My wife and I are passionate travelers. We plan our own trips and we read about the history, music, art, government and food of the places we plan to visit. I struggle to learn a few phrases to get by in other languages.
No matter how cramped airplanes have become and no matter how compromised we feel as we shed our belongings and submit to the frisking and fondling of airport security, we remain enthusiastic planners and pilgrims. And the more exotic the destination, the more excited we are.
As we have traveled, it has been impossible to escape the realization that civilizations rise and fall; and it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that one of the most compelling reasons why civilizations fail is that they ruin their environments.
Some civilizations have done this to themselves, poisoned their own environs; while other civilizations saw their environments contaminated by foreign influences. Some were invaded by brute force; others peacefully introduced new customs or germs that weakened the people or their flora or fauna.
It is one or more of these influences that caused the Mayans, who built structures that still stun 21st century engineers, to be reduced from many millions to a few remnants.
The historical principle that civilizations collapse when their environments are contaminated is worth considering for our little niche in modern society: the enterprise of school sports.
We cannot expect school sports to survive – these programs can only collapse – if we ruin the environment in which school sports breathes and lives.
This is an environment of comprehensive, community-based schools.
But schools are losing both these characteristics – both their comprehensiveness and their community base.
That we have a few schools of narrow focus is reasonable; that we have a few schools of specialized populations is tolerable; that we have a few schools without strong neighborhood connection is acceptable.
However, it does our neighborhoods no good, our communities no good, our state no good, nor our nation any good – in fact, in total, it does our nation much harm – as more and more schools trend further and further in these directions.
To abandon the school with comprehensive programs serving the invested neighborhood around it does us harm: nation, state, community and child.
It is almost irrelevant that this is bad for high school athletics. It’s bad for America.
Urgency
November 8, 2011
I still have in my files and in my mind Joe Klein’s Newsweek editorial of Sept. 21, 1992, that took Bill Clinton to task for his “small themes” during the closing months of his campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Never one to be shy in his bully pulpit at Newsweek (or in his then anonymously published novel Primary Colors based on the 1992 Democratic presidential primary), Klein wrote that Clinton’s late campaign efforts were “rhetorically flaccid, intellectually unadventurous, morally undemanding.”
In response, Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, resorted to a sports metaphor: “The way to the goal line is to keep running off tackle. Four yards and a cloud of dust.”
This “take no chances, do no harm, run out the clock” spirit and strategy that so infuriated Klein will not be seen at the MHSAA. Expectations and efforts will be in continuous crescendo no matter how close the goal line gets. In fact, as it is with any good football team in the “red zone,” the closer the goal line looms, the greater the sense of urgency there will be.
There is no greater proof at this moment to our most inner circle of constituents – high school athletics directors – than the MHSAA’s work with ArbiterSports to become the first state high school association in America to develop, and to deliver at least initially at no cost to all member high schools, a comprehensive suite of electronic tools for athletic department administration. This is a responsibility, and risk, that could have been left to others; but we’re being motivated by undertaking the task here and now – first in the nation – so that the product is tailor-made for high school sports, Michigan’s way.