* * * *
Jack Lippman
* *
*
Incursions on Democracy and Your Remedy to Them
Watching the actions of the governor of Florida,
his compliant State Legislature and the voters who have elected them, it is
clear that Florida is not unhappy with a reduction of democracy in that State,
apparently contradicting the popular will and interests of the majority of its
residents.
It is increasingly apparent that the safeguards
built into the Florida Constitution are being overturned. Appeals to State government agencies for at
least transparency are likely to fall on deaf ears. The courts of the State have been taken over
by the right wing.
It is hoped that the Florida situation is not
representative of the rest of the United States and only peculiar to that
State’s government. It is difficult to
blame this upon ignorance, gullibility, or stupidity when clearly, it is what
the voters, not necessarily the majority of residents, of Florida have voted
for.
The remaining bulwarks protecting democracy are
the State’s newspapers. It is absolutely
necessary that Florida residents read a daily newspaper, either in its print or
online version. The Sun-Sentinel, the
Palm Beach Post and the local papers in Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville fill this need. Without them, citizens remain uninformed of
how democracy is being attacked in Florida.
If you cherish democracy in Florida, you MUST read
a Florida newspaper every day. What the
State government in Tallahassee is doing is only reported truthfully by in
these papers. What the government tells
residents is merely right-wing propaganda. You need to read newspapers.
(In dictatorships throughout history, foes of
democracy have always attacked and eventually controlled newspapers. Florida has started down that path with
legislation limiting blogs with political contact that are ‘financially
supported.’ Watch out. They want to go
further.)
JL
*
* *
Basketball Violence
In the past I have criticized college football
because of the excessive violence it involves in tackling, trying to create
fumbles, and in ‘pass interference’ situations.
It’s time to include college basketball in that complaint.
There’s plenty of it on TV in the NCAA Basketball
Tournament. Notice the efforts made to
stop a player who is attempting to drive in for a ‘lay-up’ in ‘the paint’ and
the efforts of such players to force the shot blocker out of the way. Both
situations, sometimes resulting in a foul being called, sometimes not, are
unlike the blocking one sees in football line play. That’s not the way basketball was supposed to
be played.
Professional football and basketball tolerate more
violence but that’s what their players are paid for. It pleases the crowd, but it has no place in
college football or basketball, unless we finally acknowledge that these
college sports are no more than training grounds for future professional
activity, and not just adjuncts to getting an education.
 |
| Pickett |
A college basketball player whom I admire is Penn
State’s Jaylen Pickett. But looking at
him, he transferred last year to that school from Siena College, where he had
been playing, through the ‘transfer portal,’ which allows established college
athletes to announce their availability to be recruited by other schools. I believe the ‘transfer portal,’ is damaging
to college sports. It makes being on a winning team, more visible to
professional scouts, more important than the college whose jersey the player
wears and which is giving him a free ride for a four year education.
Also, even before college, some such athletes
attend specialized private schools which concentrate on developing their
athletic abilities, either on a post-high school basis or as part of a high
school program. Pickett attended such a
program (Spire Institute in Ohio) before attending Siena. There is even athletic competition between
such programs at a level above that of usual high school sports to sharpen
players’ skills.
We should not close our eyes to the professionalism which has infected college sports in this country. It is the opposite of the success of immigrants and children of immigrants who treat college as an educational experience, especially in scientific, technical, engineering and mathematical areas, rather than something intertwined with competitive athletics. The road to a successful career is far, far, narrower through athletics than through the real purpose of colleges, education.
You can see what is happening by noting the names of prominent physicians in the nation's best hospitals as well as the names of those scientists involved in important research.
JL
*
* *
Housekeeping
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is
a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see
that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. ( You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com . )
Forwarding Postings: Please
forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
If you
want to send someone the blog, exactly as you
are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can
just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com
or by providing a link to that address in your email
to them.
There’s
another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it too! Google Blogspot, the platform on
which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on
the envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, (it looks like
this: 
), you
will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses, along with a
comment from you, each of which will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now
are reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography,
or the ‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them that link or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting. Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
Have a nice day!
No comments:
Post a Comment