WAKE UP SOCIETY...THIS IS A BIG THING. THE TIMES, THEY ARE A CHANGIN'!

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Make no mistake..this is a big thing..it’s colossal..…this isn’t about “air pressure” any more than dropping a Nuclear bomb is about atoms splitting apart.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that we get the Donald Trump phenomena and the Tom Brady phenomena in the same summer….”birds of a feather....”

Instead of increasing the civility of our discourse …we are now too often eager to devalue civility and integrity….sportsmanship, honesty….it’s optional!

Trump has grown increasingly popular when he is his most derogatory….he can denigrate women, entire ethnic groups…and he can disparage the heroic contributions of a war veteran, a man who served 5 years in a POW camp …and there is little to no “blowback” from the electorate…some media people are a little apoplectic but the voters?…..Apparently it is ok to act childishly and belligerently towards a woman in the media who asked some tough question during the debate.

It is o.k. to cheat, to try and deliberately gain an unfair advantage by altering the properties of the football that your team uses when it is on offense….in the biggest sport in America, during the American Football Conference Championship game….though it is no stretch of the imagination at all to assume that Brady has been doing this for all of his games....for years...! Why would he just start for this one game? He was (caught) at this game. A guy who cheats at cards doesn’t do it once in their lifetime..they do whenever they play cards. I’d bet anything that Brady has been doing this for decades....(cheating for decades)

And then, it is o.k. to lie about it..to look us all in the eyes with righteous indignation and crooked grin and tell us a blatant lie…it is o.k. to destroy evidence….

Lance Armstrong somehow missed out on this summer of tolerance because the way I see it…Lance was caught taking performance enhancing drugs in a sport where everyone else was doing it…in a sport where you have no chance of competing if you are not taking PED’s. Most of the former Tour de France winners during Armstrong’s era were caught for taking PED’s…Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Alberto Contador, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton…and many many more….none were banned for life that I know of…

You could surely make the case that Armstrong was trying to “keep up”..... to level the “playing field”. I could have forgiven him for that….maybe,…but not the lies…the constant righteous indignation and the successful attempts to destroy and damage anyone who implicated him …even when that person was placed under oath. Lance is clearly a sociopath who has no remorse…and no regard for who he has to destroy in order to get to the top…..He is now rightfully just where he belongs...at the bottom.

Armstrong was suspended for LIFE..for taking PED’s…not for being a sociopath….or even for lying…Armstrong had to relinquish all of his 7 Tour de France victories….to a sport that had knowingly helped to shield him from being discovered as a cheater. They covered up the first failed drug test back in the 90’s. They swept in under the rug...

Lance got what he deserved…and kids can look to that outcome. and say to themselves that they live in a society that doesn’t tolerate cheaters and liars….

It was a victory for justice…though fleeting, and short lived.

Brady was amazingly unconvincing as a liar…trying to sell the absurd notion that someone other than himself had changed the ball pressure dramatically without him knowing it…and then, he said he didn’t even notice…it was all a big surprise to him, as if he didn’t remember having said a few seasons before (2011) that he likes his footballs deflated.……then, he destroyed his cell phone on the day of the deposition…and the rest is much more privileged athlete, pathetic lying history….It’s Nixonian!

Let’s be clear....Tom Brady was in a different situation entirely from Armstrong...…Brady was operating on a level playing field….but he decided he wanted to tilt it in his favor…at the expense of the other teams, their fans, the integrity of the game, etc., etc.. Tom Brady took it upon himself to grossly alter the properties of the ball used in the game (only when the Patriots were on offense) such that it made it much easier to grip, hold onto, catch, throw, etc.., during wet and cold conditions…..the opposing QB and receivers would not have that advantage...that was just for Brady!! There is no disputing that….Brady wanted to have an unfair edge and so he cheated….that word used to mean something …cheating used to be a bad thing…now it doesn’t mean so much…people on the streets tell me that “everyone cheats”. It is hard to raise kids in a society that seems to be moving in that direction……”everyone lies…everyone cheats”…

I blame our society more than I blame Brady, Donald Trump, and people like Cosby and Jameis Winston, etc…those guys are pariahs and social parasites...there are always going to be those...but what I really fear is that we are breeding a culture of narcissists; chest pounding is the new modesty; Superficiality is the new thoughtful. Integrity and substance are not valued. People spend much of their time taking photos of themselves…..and less time trying to find the ”light”…we don’t care if someone is a terrible person...we don’t even know how to define character anymore.

We determine the standard of conduct in our society….in Guatemala..you can kill women and probably suffer no consequences..such are the incredibly misogynistic standards in that part of the world…In Africa, they impose terrible conditions on women….female genital mutilation..and many other atrocities…in India, a 10 or 11 year old girl can and will be forced into marriage and servitude with men that are old enough to be her grandfather….such are the incredibly low standards in that part of the world…

But this is America….where many claim to live by the “golden rule” and where integrity has always mattered…or so I thought, at least as an ideal to aspire to.…the courts may exist to enforce the law…but society sets moral standards…and integrity standards….do we not? Even in prison everyone knows that there is a moral standard...child molesters are treated with no respect…they are going to get tormented…even criminals have standards….In the golf world…at least on the PGA tour…if you are caught even slightly cheating.you will be banished from the game. I can’t imagine what the penalty and repercussions would be if a golfer was found to be playing an illegal golf ball--one that gave him an unfair advantage…one that was explicitly forbidden by the rules. It would be fatal….he couldn’t find another pro golfer to play a practice round with….and he wouldn’t be able to blame his caddie, or say that he threw his phone away. I have never heard of someone cheating in professional golf....though I have heard, many times, of a player calling a penalty on himself…in a situation where no one saw the infraction…it has cost many players a victory in a tournament….imagine that! In golf, at least for now, it is still about (how) you play the game.

It doesn’t happen in golf…such is the unwritten code of ethics in that sport.there is a moral standard that is imposed…..though actions and court rulings regarding the Brady event is making me think that in the next generation we will see golfers who try and cheat….using the precedent and momentum from the Brady incident. People are watching….kids are watching…..water flows downhill…and this too will trickle down.

We allow recording stars to call girls “bitches” and to use incredibly sexist and misogynist violent language towards women…and there is NO repercussion. It is Orwellian. Society accepts it…we bask in it….it is almost a rite of passage…no girls that I know of are offended…they sing along…as these rap stars are accused of rape, beating women, etc.. In a similar way that Germans in Nazi Germany didn’t rise up in outrage over Hitler’s desire to exterminate the Jews and conquer the world....There were virtually NO people who rose up to oppose this....they just took what their culture and leadership gave them....a harkening back to the “Dark Ages”.

Today some are celebrating the fact a judge ruled that the NFL didn’t follow proper protocol in suspending Brady….kind of like arresting someone and then failing to read them their Miranda rights…and having to let them go free--dismiss the charges. The judge ruled that the NFL had no precedence for doling out this type of penalty for this type of offense...in other words, Brady was never made aware that he could be suspended for cheating in this manner (Oye!)...the penalties for PED use are explicit, no so with altering the football....a technicality if there ever was one....the judge didn’t rule, or even consider, Brady’s guilt...only that the penalty was one that Brady was not aware of before he decided to cheat and tamper with the footballs...

Brady won’t miss a game…hurrah…there is one winner…or maybe two if you count his lawyer..but there are a lot of people who lost…..we won’t know the actual number for years to come. It is insidiously corrosive to the body politic.

in 1919, almost a full century ago...several Chicago White Sox players including one of the game’s greatest, Joe Jackson, were banned for life for trying to ”fix” the outcome of the 1919 World Series. They tried to compromise the integrity of the game...they were banished for life...

The headline of the paper the following day was.....”SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE”. It was a big thing! It wasn’t about air pressure then...and it isn’t about air pressure now.

Wake Up Society...This is a big thing!

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.