Jack's Essay: Sports Then & Now - 9/22/05

I never played organized sports as a child, for a variety of reasons. Mostly this was because I have the athletic ability and coordination of wet linguini. The times were different, though. This was the early 1960s. In my day kids could, and did, play a form of baseball in the front yard with a deflated beach ball.
Today, it seems that suburban parents get nasty looks if their kids aren’t constantly in organized activities. Take my godson Nick, who is seven years old and crazy about all sports.
His favorite is hockey. His parents take him to practice at 7:30 on weekend mornings. They take him to games on Friday nights, when they are both exhausted. He lives near the Detroit Zoo, and last year was in a league which had playoffs and tournaments– for six year olds -- in places like Flint and Muskegon.
Last year, his parents spent more than $2,000 on everything from equipment to ice fees.  I don’t know how they do it, and it seems clear that any poor child would be priced right out of kiddie hockey.
His mother, Alice, a writer in her early 40s, told me she was vaguely uneasy that things are so structured these days, but, as she said, “that’s the way things are now. And they make you feel like a bad parent if you say your kids are just out playing.”
That doesn’t mean sports have prevented Nick from being well rounded. Back when he was four, he used to stand in his driveway and sing the American and Canadian National Anthems before imaginary hockey games.
One day, after the Olympics, he asked if I could teach him the Russian National Anthem. I said yes. But not quite yet.
Dosvedaniya, tovarishchii. 

Comments

[Christopher King]

One issue not addressed during the athletics/sports discussion is the bullying which takes place in all schools by athletes against those ont on the team or against those with mediocre athletic skills. Remember one of the reasons given for the shootings at Columbine HS in Colorado was the bullying by football players against the boys who were driven to prepetrate the shootings. I graduated from a Class D school in 1962. Bullying was common then. I substitute in a Class A school and see it still today.

[Dan Smith]

I think that our never ending obsession with kids trying to be better and better disgusting. When I was a kid I got home and ran outside and played. Now kids have football practices every day after school two to three hours of homework and it's off to bed. I'm only 30 so it wasn't that long ago that I was in school, playing baseball or army in the back yard. Now I don't think kids have time for it, and it's a shame. You've got your whole life to be competitive, and try and keep up with the "jones'". I don't want my daughter to have to feel that way. Have a good time. What the hell is the point of sending our kids to school if they need to do everything after school. Parents need to lighten up.

[Pio Zammit]

Feminism: Patricia Hilton: today's show:

It is good that men learn to look at the world through women's eyes..as did the book "Gift From the Sea" by ann Morrow Lindberg teach us to do.
However, women who seek rights of men..which all rights are equal..still are not men and men are not women. So, for women to seek pro-choice as republican's as if true feminism has to be pro-choice, they are wrong. The 14th amendment that gives women equal rights of due process does NOT give women the right to violate the rights of girl and boy embrio's that are by the Statute of LIfe true legal citizens. That means that embrios - human beings from conception - have just as many rights to life as does the femininists who seek to violate the rights of embrios for the so-called health of the mother which translates as her economic good, her emotional goood or her birthcontrol good. A true feminiest would be only be true if she seeks the rights of the unborn because these little ones are women to be...and their rights are equal now to all our rights. If feminists cannot see that, it is because they they see thier rights as not equal to ebrios' rights but that they are superior in their own eyes..which makes them just like the men who kept them down for all these years. Yes, feminazi's is wrong; but that is what they become if they annihilate the unborn to seek their own agenda. Feminism that seeks to act like men who put women down are just like the men they seek to teach to be tolerant. But if women are not tolerant of the unborn's rights, why should anyone give ear to the feminists' agenda?

God is pro-life, why can we be the same?

PIo Zammit, [email protected]