Ethos!
For those of you who may not know, ethos is a Greek word for character and can apply to individuals as well as groups of all sizes.
It is the last weekend before fall begins and change is in the air just as some things never seem to change at all. We were watching a St. Louis Cardinal baseball game the other night when one of the opposing team’s outfielders went to catch a baseball up against the stands when a fan started to interfere with the process by grabbing the outfielders arm. The outfielder made the catch anyway and just stared at the fan as he threw the ball back into the infield. Then an interesting thing happened. This same outfielder caught another ball to end the inning and ran over to the same fan who had bothered him previously and quietly presented his son with the ball. The look on both of their faces was priceless but the look on the little boys face was one of awe.
Baseball season is winding down and football season is getting into full swing from high school on through college and the pro’s as well. And we have been greeted with the actions of one Adrian Peterson who has felt the need to beat up on his child as he is part of a seemingly endless parade of football personalities who seem to see the need to do this sort of thing and who feel that it is their rite of passage to do so. We remember the old George Carlin monologue where he tells us about how baseball is described by terms like “coming home” to describe scoring a run while football is described by “moving into enemy territory” when the football team is getting ready to score a touchdown. Perhaps there is a tendency to exaggerate when using these terms but, in reality, there is a great deal of violence involved in contact sports like football where baseball has even gone to the extreme this season of forcing catchers to give runners a path to the plate to avoid injuries to either party who have so often been involved in collisions at home in the past.
And then there is the issue of drug use in professional sports. Baseball suspended Milwaukee Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun for a whole season for his use of drugs recently while we constantly see football suspending players for a few games for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. Now you might think that this post is about these items exclusively but it really is not at all. What we are writing about today has more to do with the look on that young fans face when the Milwaukee Brewer Geraldo Parra presented him with that baseball even though his father had tried to interfere with the play than it is anything else. It was almost as if the baseball player was saying by his actions that if I can’t do anything about you perhaps I can affect your child in some positive way. It is also interesting to note that Ryan Braun was standing a short distance away when all of this transpired.
We posted a quote that we found on Face book recently which stated in so many words that instead of raising a generation of children to be tough enough to survive in this cruel and heartless world we should instead be raising children to try to make this world less cruel and heartless to begin with. It is our choice how we raise our children and there are always going to be enough characters out there to raise children to be violent and to take with brute force what they feel is their right to possess. Our children are watching our every move and they want to be like their fathers in most regards. So, how we act will influence to a great degree what our children who will one day inherit this earth and this society will grow to maturity to be. Will they be reasonable and mature adults or will they be the type of people who will beat their wives and possibly their children on their way to whatever goal in life they want to possess? Past experience shows that those who get beaten will, all too often, grow up to be beaters themselves and will break the hearts of those who will try to love them in spite of it all while they perpetuate a cycle of anger, frustration and abuse that is all too prevalent in certain segments of our society today. God only knows that we don’t need to be glorifying and spreading this activity by allowing highly paid people who abuse to perform for us on our television sets on an otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoon.
So, on this last Sunday of another fading summer when change is in the air we might pause to remember and reflect on the examples that we set for others and especially those small, impressionable souls who know nothing better than to adore us so. We bring them into this world in acts of intimate love and we, in the end, bequeath to them both the future and our own place in it that they will carry both as an honor or a burden depending on how we choose to carry out our lives before those small watching eyes that can either flinch in pain at our violence or stare in wonder at our acts of selfless kindness toward those that we know only as other human beings if nothing more.
We are white, we are brown, we are black and other colors of the rainbow of life but we all love our children as nothing else and to so many of us they are ultimately the only thing that matters in a life that goes so quickly past. We owe it to ourselves and the human race to give them the very best example that we can possibly put forth so that future generations might find this place a habitable and decent environment to bear children of their own.
IOVHO,
Joe
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