Out-Punting Our Coverage
March 19, 2013
Any traveler to the Atlantic coast of any Central American country will witness firsthand the arrogance of the human race.
Strewn along almost every shore is the waste of nations outliving their means. Plastic in all shapes and colors, from products of all types – bottles, toys, sandals, tools.
Island nations to the east, unable to cope with the volume of their waste, cast it off covertly under cover of night. Oceangoing vessels large and small heave it overboard.
My wife puts it this way: “We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.” Humans have fantastic abilities to create, but we do so without conscience, without caring enough about consequences.
This clearly applies to the world’s waste problem – from cast-off containers to used cars to computers made obsolete in a matter of months. We keep producing more and more, without plans for the waste of producing new products or the waste created by making existing things obsolete.
In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of trash the size of Texas is circulating as if there were a drain. But there isn’t one. No easy answer to flush human waste – the excrement of our greed – to some other place where it will do no harm.
In Chinese cities today the air, water and land are toxic – much as it was in developing US cities around 1900 – as China takes its turn to poison its people in the name of progress.
That we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. In sports terms, the human race has out-punted its coverage, and the consequences are far more dire than a punt return for a touchdown.
A Backhanded Compliment
April 17, 2012
A year ago this month I listened to the attorney for another statewide high school athletic association pose this question: “Why is it that people quite readily accept inflexible age limitations over a broad spectrum of American life, including sports, but presuppose it is wrong for school sports?”
This attorney was in the middle of a controversy that more recently has visited the MHSAA: an overage student seeking relief from a universally applied maximum age rule. The speaker was perplexed and frustrated by the double standard.
Part of the reason for the double standard rests in the reality that people value the school sports experience so much more than other parts of life, including other sports experiences. Because they want the opportunity to play, they resort to litigation in an attempt to create the right to play.
Another part of the reason school sports is challenged on an issue on which other programs get a free pass is that school sports has a centralized authority, close to home. State high school associations are readily accessible targets, easier both to find and to fight with than most other entities with age restrictions.
And, of course, part of the reason for the double standard is the proximity of interscholastic athletics to academics – the former extracurricular, the latter curricular – the former a privilege for most teenagers, the latter a right of all citizens to age 26.
The reasons school sports are attacked on this issue while other entities are not are reasons really complimentary to school sports: the program is popular, accessible and connected to education. None of these features of school sports, or its age limitation, should change.