Is anyone truly surprised by the recent allegations of steroid use surrounding baseball wonder boys, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez? I doubt it; you may think so, but I’m pretty sure you’re confusing shock with disdain, contempt, and disappointment. You have to be pretty naive to be surprised now-a-days, especially when you can’t remember the last three month period of your life free of cheating, corruption, scandal, and malice. Think about it; it’s really no shocker that America’s old pastime has officially, today, been replaced with America’s new pastime: cheating, disconnect, and skepticism.

It was shocking at first, that’s for sure. I didn’t want to believe that the races to break Roger Maris’ and Hank Aaron’s records had been tainted and fraudulent, but alas it was so, and thus devastating. But we moved on - and steroid use in baseball seemed controlled and isolated to an older generation of baseball players that have since been removed from prevalence  through retirement or ability. Today’s players were either always clean or had learned their lesson - everyone makes mistakes, the important part is learning your lesson, right Pete?

Apparently not so and how sorry is it that baseball serves to show us that we REALLY can no longer expect goodness and integrity from the majority of people? We’ve always had problems that’s for sure, but that was different - you could still get a cup of sugar from your neighbor without having to wonder if they were a registered sex offender. It used to be that it was acceptable that there would always be a few bad eggs in the carton but most were good, but that’s just not the case anymore in American society - our eggs are rotten. Our insistence  on rewarding individual achievement over  societal contribution is becoming apparent almost every way we look. No pun intended, but pumping up individual achievement to trump societal gain  is one really big cycle, the only question left to answer in order to fix the situation is the chicken or the egg. Maybe the cheating caused us to be skeptical, which then caused us to disconnect, which made it okay to cheat, which made us more skeptical, which made us even more disconnected… you get it?

Steroids in baseball might not be completely parallel in execution and affect to the Bernie Medoffs, housing bubbles, golden parachutes, ect but on a sociological level - it’s damn close. Sadly it really should be no surprise that our national pastime is no exception, after all a national pastime serves to demonstrate the values most important to its beholders, yes?

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