=== The Players' Union ===

As pointed out at LL, the aggrieved parties in steroids are the players who do not use steroids.  No doubts there.  Which raises the question, if they don't object, why should we as onlookers?

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=== We Are the World Dept. ===

In the real world, I don't buy the idea that any of my son's football teammates used steroids because pro athletes do.  I give these kids credit for intelligence.  I think that a 17-year-old high school star knows everything that is at stake, and chooses clear-headedly.

It's a little different with (say) movies and songs selling counterculture, where the message is insidious.  IOften the audience is being affected despite not being aware of such on a conscious level. 

I just asked a young lady whether the anti-militaristic, enlightened-savage-trumps-greedy-white-man themes in Avatar bothered her.  She was  dumbfounded at the question ...

(One movie reviewer compared James Cameron to a guy taking a joyride on the moon buggy while flipping off NASA.  Who is more White Corporate America than James Cameron?  How much did that movie cost to make?  ... we digress...)

I would argue that when it comes to steroids, young people are essentially in thinking mode.  And for that reason, the influence argument doesn't weigh heavily with me.

I couldn't care less if you tried to persuade my son, intelligently and using rational arguments, to go move in with three girls.  I do object if you try to influence him to do so, without his knowing you're doing it.

Steroid use doesn't bother me as much, in terms of influence, because free Americans are free to present both sides of the case with no holds barred -- and let the young people decide for themselves.

...........

It's frustrating to me, that the things that I do worry about with my kids -- alcohol abuse, partying, condoms in high schools reinforcing the idea that premarital sex is the norm, entitlement, greed, etc --

The things I do worry about, one right after the other BOOM BOOM BOOM it's like Ichiro going 12-for-12 in a weekend series -- the published authors argue that you have to leave it alone.  You just can't influence young people.  So you might as well give them the tools to limit damage, and accept that they'll partake...

Then the things where I feel like my own kids are in no real danger of being insidiously persuaded -- cigarettes, steroids, or missing the recycle bin with their pop can -- those things, the media suffers the vapors and swoons away at the "irresponsibility" of public figures exemplifying these things.

You remember when Alicia Silverstone nearly got blackballed from Hollywood for smoking cigarettes indiscreetly?  I was thinking, it needed to have bud in it, and then she'd have starred in Titanic.

...........

The owners have tried many times to convince the Player's Union to toughen up on steroids.  The union consistently warns the owners that it is a strikeable issue.

The Player's Union itself has institutionalized steroids.   And the players are the only real victims here.   So what do the rest of us care?

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=== Psychoanalyst Joe Dept. ===

So why do the HOF voters get so crazy about steroids?  What do they care?   I don't buy it being about the kids.  There are 9,000 other things in society to be more scared of kids imitating.

What, then?

......

It ain't the sanctified history of the game. 

'roids wouldn't have made Babe Ruth's top 20 vices.  Baseball has spitball eras and color-line eras and World War eras and Greenie eras and Coke eras and game-fixing eras and eighteen other eras.  

......

It was Abbie Hoffman or Bob Dylan or somebody who put it in a way I could understand it.  :- )  I think it was in one of Hoffman's amazing New York City leaflets.  He said something like, "at that time I was in college, man, just your typical Leftie in search of a cause..."

When a young man rejects his father's ideals, he'll search for others.  But what if Dad and Grandpa already were interested in most of the 10 weightiest causes?

Many of the Causes in America are, in my view, lightweight, compared to the things that Eisenhower and Roosevelt stood up for...

Bob Costas delivers sermons against steroid use.  Is this the best item left that we can safely preach against -- without being tagged as preacherly?

Everybody wants to preach about some Inconvenient Truth or other.  The question is, which sermon can I safely deliver?  

When I find the right sermon, the one my friends will admire me for, heaven help the unbeliever... behold the heretic with the Scarlet S, weeping on national television, anguishing justly in the fires of his sins.   Siggghhhhh.  Example-Making is the New Tolerance.

.........

Straining at a gnat, and swallowing a camel.  John Lennon and his heroin use are iconic with most of these media-preachers.  Everybody wishes he wuz Ozzie.  'ypocrites, the lot o' them.  

Chill about the steroids.  The players have the game they want.  And the HOF ain't as legit without the HR leader in it.

My $0.02,

Jeff