Tuesday, August 26, 2008

"I feel like it's all my fault nobody could play."

Jericho Scott, a 9 year old flame-throwing little league pitcher, has been told that he is too good to play.

Jericho doesn't know that the feeling he's expressing in the title quote, unearned guilt, is the one that is currently destroying the world. A lot of terrible things happen around the globe, child molestation, rape, genocide, etc., but none of it gets to me like this story did. At such a young age I would think something like this could easily be as psychologically damaging as all that other bad stuff. This kid has had his world turned upside down on him at an age at which he is most likely way too young to be able to understand the nature of his enemy and combat it. The message being sent to him is "achievement is bad, mediocrity is good." They might as well have chopped off his arms.

As Eric Hoffer said, "We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind." Apparently Hoffer was wrong in this case, however. If you type "Jericho Scott" in to Google, you'll find a lot of outraged people all over the country.

2 comments:

Mom said...

Along similar ines, read this.

Mom said...

Lines, I mean.