by Matthew DeCapua

A great deal of virtual ink has been spilled since the unfortunate events of Ferguson, MO began to play out across the mass media and some if it is tapping into a larger issue that has long irked me.

As a nation we are obsessed with being right. We like to be right?all the time. For some reason we think this is a realistic ambition and we pursue it with zealous determination to the point where we’re having a difficult time hearing one another anymore.

Too often, whether we are aware of it or not, we interpret a willingness to establish an actual dialogue that involves both talking?and listening as weakness, or worse, a failing. We’re not really interested in discussion or debate. We’re not open to the possibility of learning new information or changing our perspective due to a well-reasoned argument that had not previously occurred to us.

We just want to be right. So we speak our mind, repeatedly, giving no quarter, acknowledging no alternative, louder and more defensively, until the other person either admits defeat or walks away.

One of the more recent socio-linguistic mechanisms we have developed to support this “style” of non-discussion is to conclude an opinion with the passive-aggressive deployment of the phrase “just saying.”

And at great risk of offending?a lot of people I know and love, as of this moment I am on record as writing that the phrase “just saying”?makes me sick to my stomach.

Let’s break it down.

The first of the many heinous things that “just saying” accomplishes is to immediately end the conversation. It’s the verbal equivalent of a smug smirk while walking away.?The speaker has just gained the final — and?right — words on the subject, and now the matter is closed to any possibility of further discussion.

That’s rude.

The second mortal sin of “just saying” is the tacit implication that, because the speaker is expressing a personal opinion, the speaker?cannot be questioned. Any attempt at refutation or even further discussion?can now freely be interpreted as a hostile personal attack, and responded to in kind. Once the “just saying” bomb has been dropped, it’s no longer a conversation. It’s a fight.

This leads to the?most damning offense of “just saying.” By claiming the topic as a deeply-held personal belief, the speaker is in effect communicating that whatever personal feelings anyone else may have on the subject are not only irrelevant but also inferior to the speaker’s. It’s the equivalent of saying “your opinion does not matter to me, but mine?had better?matter to you, and we’re done here now.”

We live in a time of incredible tumult and churn, and it is not going to end anytime soon. It seems to me, therefore, that it is in everyone’s best interests to look for ways to communicate more, not less. There are no end of horrible examples playing out in today’s headlines to demonstrate what happens when people no longer care enough to truly listen to one another.

Rather than cut you off with a “just saying,” I would always rather sit down and hear you out, and hope that you will be willing to do the same with me. So let’s drop “just saying” from our collective vocabulary and replace it with something far more positive and useful.

You were saying…

?Start with a set of variables.

?x = poverty-wage earners

?y = the short-term unemployed

z = the long-term unemployed

Add them up, and one of the many possible titles for the resulting summation could be ?People Who Can?t Participate In The Economy.? The denizens of this XYZ group can?t buy homes or cars or flat-screen TVs, they can?t purchase apps indiscriminately from the iTunes store, they can?t eat out regularly at TGIFriday?s or check out the new spring line at Banana Republic. Not only do they not have savings or contribute to investment vehicles, many of them don’t even have bank accounts.

For all intents and purposes, this group of people, approximately 30,195,500, representing nearly 18% of the total possible American civilian workforce,* are sitting on the sidelines of consumer culture, unable to meaningfully participate in the economy.

The good news, at least for now, is that the XYZ group is shrinking. Wages are going up, and a portion of the sub-group z has moved back into sub-group y.

But the bad news, long-term, couldn’t be much worse. There is little doubt that wealth distribution in the United States has become increasingly unbalanced, and the slope is only getting more slippery. Without a comprehensive change to the status quo, it is at least plausible, if not indeed highly likely, that over time the XYZ group will continue to increase. The economy will shrink under the downward pressure exerted by an ever-growing portion of the population that has little or no purchasing power.

When that happens, nobody wins.

Unhelpfully, to date the public reaction to income inequality tends to be highly polarized, as evidenced by groups like Occupy Wall Street, or the bizarre instances of billionaires comparing liberals to Nazis.

What is needed is a sober, transparent and highly public discussion about our economic future, one that is as pragmatic as it is?innovative.

The first step is for all concerned parties to admit that (1) we are facing a grave problem with potentially catastrophic consequences that requires action to solve, and (2) at present we do not yet have the tools to solve it.

As is often the case, this first step has so far been the hardest to take.

And as long as that remains true, then we really only have to ask ourselves one question: how many active participants does it take to sustain our economy? Or, perhaps more ominously, how long do we have until we reach that macabre tipping point?

____________________________________

*Numbers calculated from 2010 census date:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110301.htm

approximately 14,895,500 American civilian workers made less than $11,139 in 2010 (the poverty line for that year). 8.9M such workers were recognized as ?short-term unemployed? and another 6.4M such workers were labeled ?long-term unemployed? in December of 2010. The total civilian workforce recognized by the census in December of 2010 was 153,950,000.

A man carrying a perfectly legal concealed weapon is walking across a parking lot towards a grocery store when he sees another man. He recognizes the second man as being a staunch opponent of the Second Amendment.

The first man begins to experience severe anxiety. After all, he lives in a country where there are nine guns for every ten people. If he doesn’t have his gun, he and his family could become vulnerable to the many people who do have guns. His life could be in jeopardy. The second man represents a clear and present danger to him and his family.

Panic rising, he pulls out his sidearm and shoots the second man. Two shots to the torso, one to the head. The second man falls dead.

When the police arrive on the scene, the armed man, clearly shaken, explains that the second man was trying to put him and his entire family at grave risk. The armed man was afraid for his life. The police let him go, and that’s the end of the story.

Do you think this is far-fetched?

The last eight months have rendered what should be terrifying court verdicts in cases involving clearly over-aggressive gun owners.

George Zimmerman pursuing, beginning an altercation with, and then shooting unarmed Trayvon Martin dead.

Curtis Reeves picking a fight with Chad Oulsen at a movie theater over a cell phone, and then shooting him dead.

Michael Dunn starting an argument with Jordan Davis over a car stereo, and then shooting him dead.

This is a trend that is already on its frightening way down the slippery slope.

Handguns, like assault rifles, have only one purpose. They were designed to kill people as efficiently as possible. They’re not tools. They’re not hunting aides.

For a long time, the ultra-right gun lobbies of the United States have worked hard — and successfully — to win maximum possible access to these single-purpose weapons.

But that was just the first step in a larger struggle. Because, and this is the sticking point,?what’s the point of owning a gun if you can’t use it for it’s intended purpose?

We will never know the “other side of the story” in the three cases cited earlier because there is no “other side.” All that remains is a dead person, and the word of the gun owner as to why that person deserved to be dead.

We’re turning into the Wild West.

by Matthew DeCapua

The initial punishment handed down to Alex Rodriguez by Major League Baseball in the wake of the Bosch Anti-Aging Clinic scandal, an unprecedented 211-game suspension?for the fallen superstar, seemed somehow not right.

To wit: why was Rodriguez’s suspension more than four times as severe as those of other players who were guilty of the same infraction?

The cynical answer is, of course, money. As the game’s highest-paid player it stands to reason (for some) that should Rodriguez ever be caught cheating the punishment should be commensurate with the enormous wealth he has amassed playing baseball.

A more vengeful answer might be that Alex Rodriguez is, to use the vernacular, a complete wanker. By all accounts he is a?pretentious, egomaniacal, spoiled man-child, who is universally disliked even by fans of his own team(s). At best, he comes across as arrogant. At worst, he can act and sound like an unequivocal asshole.

However.

If justice and fair play are the penultimate goals of Major League Baseball, then obviously these two reasons carry no weight. The rules are supposed to be the same whether a player makes league minimum or the biggest salary ever inked into a contract. Likewise, as there are no dispensations for being an otherwise nice guy, neither can there be additional penalties for being a prick.

Perhaps, then, ?justice and fair play are not the primary aim.

There can be no doubt that Major League Baseball has endured a decades-long systemic league-wide era of rampant performance-enhancing drug use. This epidemic infected all 31 of the 31 clubhouses. To various degrees, nearly everyone involved in baseball during this era is in some way, shape or form, complicit. The players, untold numbers of them, who used the drugs. The other players, an embarrassingly small fraction of them, who did not use PEDs but saw others dope up and chose to remain silent about it. The coaches and trainers who helped administer the drugs, privately advocated their use, and/or willingly turned a blind eye. The press, who had suspicions, but chose not to investigate because stories about players accomplishing impossible on-field feats sold newspapers and sports books. And the owners, the networks, and the entity of Major League Baseball itself, all of whom sit at the top of the pyramid and profit obscenely from all of it.

Every single one of these complicit entities — players, coaches, scouts, reporters, networks, commentators, front offices, owners, and the league itself — were making a living, and in many cases a killing, by protecting the status quo. The pursuit of money was paramount in all of their minds, and the singular driving force behind all of the complicity.

A good financial world parallel would be the housing market bubble. All of the major players knew something serious was wrong. Many of them were actively cheating the system. Everyone was profiting from it. The only question was how long until the bubble burst.

In both instances, of course, everyone now knows that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

But this isn’t the story that’s playing out in the press — the same press that is undeniably part of the profiteering of the steroid era. This should be an age of humble mea culpas from essentially every single person connected to Major League Baseball, including the league itself, over the last twenty years. There should be a broad, transparent, and very public discussion about not only how to emphatically end the steroid era, but also how to prevent future similar scandals. This discussion should include a great many people, from the commissioner on down to the bat boys, from network executives on down to beat reporters, standing up and saying “I was wrong.”

But that’s not what’s happening.

Instead, there is a race to see who can point the biggest finger at the player most likely to successfully be framed not so much as emblematic of a broad, pervasive, all-inclusive, institutional problem, but rather as the problem, individually and independent of everyone and everything else.

The first such player to be saddled with this burden was Barry Bonds. The second was Roger Clemens. And now the third in the trifecta is Alex Rodriguez. The common elements of the three are that they all doped, they all became rich and famous thanks to baseball, and they’re all jerks with terrible personal reputations, bad press relationships, and few friends in places that matter.

Like nearly every fan, I would like to see Major League Baseball and the press that covers the game rigorously work to get performance enhancing drugs off the field and out of the clubhouses, and to deliver the message, especially to the game’s younger fans, that cheaters never prosper. But I am concerned that the public prosecution and disproportionate punishment of a player like Rodriguez represents an institution not so much interested in reform or making admission of an environment in which all parties were culpable, so much as an institution primarily concerned with its money.

The prosecution of Rodriguez and the zeal with which the press has covered it suggests that the fundamental flaw that permitted the steroid era in the first place has not yet even begun to be addressed. All of the pieces are therefore in place for future scandals that will threaten the integrity of the game.

You can’t pin that on Alex Rodriguez.