Answer true or false for the following statements:
- I have a right to regulate what an athlete puts in their own body.
- My values and my understanding of what is good for an athlete are superior to those of said athlete.
- When athletes take drugs, it directly affects me in a big way.
Yes, I’m sure Mark McGwire is physically and emotionally ruined from those bad old illegal things he put in his body. I’m sure he sobs of regret as he curls up in his money pile every night, comforted only by his physically perfect spouse. It totally wasn’t worth looking like Cro-Magnon man with back-ne just to have the G.D.P. of Bolivia.
It’s baseball.
In other news, the blue people in “Avatar” aren’t real either.
At this point, it’s ridiculous to ask Congress to address something entertainers do to themselves. They are already desperately behind on an issue that affects what economists refer to as “the commons” in an epic way.
Any congressman or woman’s mentioning of anything like baseball or the BCS system is probably a semblance designed specifically to distract you from their staggering lethargy and incompetence.
The planet is changing in a shockingly observable way. Droughts are getting longer. Wildfires are turning more deadly. Researchers believe that sea levels may rise as much as three feet in the next 90 years. Eleven of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last 13 years.
Every reputable research organization – from NASA to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – acknowledges that this is happening and that we are playing a significant role.
The oil and coal companies – as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – must on some level realize this, because they’re spending an unprecedented amount on propaganda that says the opposite.
The Republicans continue to spread lies, abandoning their pseudoscience for a more emotional campaign of scaring people into thinking any proactiveness will make energy costs skyrocket (according to the Congressional Budget Office, the climate bill would have saved the average low-income American $40 a year).
The GOP distorted one MIT study of economic effects so badly that the author called John Boehner and asked them to stop – but they continued to print it up.
Politicians like Sen. John McCain who used to have a moderate, bipartisan attitude toward the issue – and sponsored promising legislation — will no longer admit there is a problem, instead choosing to pander to the new grassroots enthusiasts.
The bill changed to free-market solution, then to watered-down free-market solution, then to dead in the water. All of this accumulated in December at the U.N. Climate Change Conference. Obama showed up with nothing, and no legally binding measures were passed.
There’s your national loss of innocence, or whatever aphorism you want to use. There’s your heartbreak. This is what I need from my college paper – not a junior version of USA Today.
We need to burn what little time, power, and integrity actually exists on Capitol Hill on potentially devastating, universal issues – not trying to regulate a hyper-reality filled with neckless demigods, a world that affects you in no possible way save the fact that it’s distracting you from real problems.
Josh Veazey is a senior majoring in telecommunication and film. His column runs weekly on Wednesdays
