Wasting time with Roger Clemens

Al’s
Loupe                                                                                 Read Spanish Version

Wasting
time with Roger Clemens

By
Alvaro F. Fernandez
alfernandez@the-beach.net

Major
League baseball player Roger Clemens throws a 95-miles-per-hour
fastball. For 20 years this very large man has been looking people in
the eye before firing a round, hard and deadly object. Dare challenge
him and he will
throw his next pitch straight at your head. If you don’t hit the
ground fast enough, you risk death or serious injury. It has made him
a Hall of Fame pitcher.

Clemens
is being accused of taking steroids. The U.S. Congress is
investigating him and many others like him who play major league
sports. Just last week Clemens spent a full day testifying before a
congressional sub-committee investigating steroid and human growth
hormone use in sports. It went live on almost every major news
network.

While
Clemens stared down members of congress, there are still 50 million
Americans without any health insurance. There may be another 50
million covered who will not visit the doctor because they cannot
afford the co-payment or deductibles insurance companies demand.

On
another front, recession is quickly finding its way and attacking
middle America. If there are any doubts, check out foreclosures on
middle class homes. Our children are being attacked too. Our system
of education continues to get worse. What was once known as this
society’s great equalizer has been turned into a system that
promotes a great name — “No child left behind” — while in fact
failing our children.

Global
warming and the environment are not being taken seriously. A Farm
Bill which should have passed congress last year is still being
debated in 2008. This legislation, which regulates the gamut from
what our children eat in public schools to food stamps, national
parks, our food to fuel programs and everything in between, is at a
standstill because members of congress, who promised reform, still
want to subsidize 10 percent of the country’s richest farm
conglomerates while leaving the scraps to the 90 percent struggling
to survive on the farm.

But
there’s more…

In
the Middle East, the war in Iraq rages: more and more American lives
lost every day; that’s without considering the huge numbers of
Iraqis (most innocent of any crime) who have been killed by this war.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are out of control. The African continent is
imploding. South America, although a next door neighbor, is mostly
ignored and seems to float further and further away from us.

And
what is congress doing? They divert attention from the problems they
should be addressing and focus on the sports/entertainment looking
glass. It’s Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and all the other
celebrity-waste-of-times all over again, and the media falls all over
it. Which often leads me to wonder if today’s media is stupid or
just being told to play the game no matter how stupid they look. They
were “fooled” with the embedded Iraqi adventure, now they keep
their eyes off the ball while it’s thrown at their heads.

Sure,
it is sad what sports in this country are becoming. It’s all about
instant gratification for the owners, athletes and fans who pay large
dollars allowing the latter to become wealthy beyond their dreams.
The fan then demands performance. And that’s where the enhancing
performance drugs come in. It’s all about muscles and home runs as
slowly the rich ballplayer poisons him or herself.

But
the fact is that that’s what professional sports have become. If
the athletes want to slowly kill themselves while showing us how much
further they can hit a baseball, then let them do it. Who cares?

It’s
not like we’re living through the best of times. So as I turned on
CNN, FOX, MSNBC, CNBC and every other alphabet soup TV station to see
what was happening the day Clemens was making his pitch to the
congress, all I could think of was why the hell are these guys
wasting their time and ours… 

The
U.S. needs solutions to very major problems. We’re not going to
find them on any baseball field, or for that matter, by investigating
steroid use by pro athletes.