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Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Sun 8/24/2003 5:32 AM
Random Thought: Infrastructure
We are witnessing a failure of infrastructure. No, not the
electrical blackout in the northeast. I'm talking about something darker:
the regrettably "Bliss-fulness" of collegiate sports. It is something
that must concern each and every one of us and from which we should not
and cannot hide in the proverbial pristine ivory tower. I am talking
about our explicit or implicit, vocal or tacit support of the high-roller,
high stakes, high-risk, high-reward rackets of high school and collegiate
sports that tolerate--and even often abet--cheating, criminality, lying,
bribing, intimidation, cover-up, hypocrisy, and all manners of corruption.
I'm talking about hordes of supposedly educated, "should-know-better"
academics and non-academics who are prostituting themselves for a slice in
a multi-billion dollar high school and collegiate sports industry. Above
all, I am talking about a refusal to accept personal responsibility and
blaming it all on the devil of the system.
Unless we choose to respond to moral and ethical misdeeds with
courage, integrity and honor, our individual and collective morality
actually gets weaker, and we all become larger partners in high school and
collegiate athletic crime.
Almost everyone is screaming to change the system in ways that
acknowledge and accept what is, that the cheating becomes cheating no
longer, student-athletes are no longer students, amateurs are no longer
amateurs. Many want to submit to what the system has become rather than
fight to make it what it should be. It's the same ole, same ole. Everyone
wants to change the system because no one wants to change themselves. It
is wishful thinking to think that things will change without us changing.
We make our own bed and then act as victims when we sleep in it--and
continue to sleep in it. To paraphrase Pogo, we blame the system and the
system is us. So, I say we first have to change ourselves, for nothing
will change until we each change.
Unless we can handle that simple truth, unless we hold ourselves
accountable, unless we understand and accept the role our choices play in
the things that happen throughout collegiate sports, we are emotionally
and morally immature. We live in the child's world of "It got lost"
rather than walk in the adult world of "I lost it." No one improves
anything by failing to take responsibility. To the contrary, the failure
to assume responsibility is to surrender our ability to respond to
circumstances, to choose our attitudes and actions and reactions, and to
shape our lives. That is little more than self-imposed servitude--even
slavery--to circumstances and other people.
The fundamental problem, then, is not the infrastructure of high
school and collegiate sports. The seminal problem is the infrastructure
within each of us. We have neglected our own infrastructure! Temptation
is invited through the door that we have deliberately left open, and we
have supped with it over a ten course dinner. Someone once said that we
are each living on the honor system, that we are each responsible for our
own moral decisions, that we each weigh the consequences of our behavior,
that the results of our moral actions are with us everyday, and that the
results of our ethical choices play themselves out every day both in our
inner and outer worlds.
We have not taken good care of integrity, authenticity, honesty,
trustworthiness, trustworthiness, fairness, responsibility, morality,
ethics. That is critical, for, to paraphrase Pogo, the system is us. We
allow the compromising system to compromise us only because we already
have compromised ourselves, and have thereby compromised the system.
It's true we each are only one. Nevertheless, we each are one.
The fact we each are only one shouldn't prevent each of us from doing what
we each can do to break this vicious circle. This situation needs each of
us to do something. If we each don't heed Edmund Burke and if we each
keep on silently doing nothing, collegiate sports will continue to be
even more "Bliss-ful."
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