The Science And Sociology Of PEDs

One of the problems my high school physics class devised and worked out to test the pressure limits
of human bone reminds me of the performance enhancing drug scandals now plaguing American
sports.
We found the possible density of human bone, and human muscle.
Then we worked out some equations on how the two groups of human tissue masses support one
another.
Muscle, more tender and more malleable, could be amassed more easily on the body than bone- but
to the limits that bone could grow to support it. More poundage could be supported in muscle than in
bone.
Bone, we measured, could support height in humans somewhat south of eight feet tall.
Once a human being reached eight feet or so, if he or she stood up, their bones would crush each other.
Gravity is gravity.
It will pull anything on earth toward the earth at approximately 10 meters per second, for every second a thing can move or be pulled toward the earth's center; and density is density. We did those
experiments fifty years ago.
A certain amount of force- or mass x ability to move or be moved, will crush.
And so fifty years ago people a lot more savvy than me knew a lot about the limits of endurance of
natural muscle and bone.
I assumed everyone in America knew full well Lance Armstrong wasn't winning all those Tour de France fair and square. Why would he? He wasn't superman. He was a not-so-young cancer survivor. He just doped enough to contract cancer and keep on pushing. Armstrong as some Texas American superman defied all logic.
I didn't understand the French going along with it, so I began to ignore the whole spectacle. I thought
eventually everyone would have to do the same so that someday, some true athlete could showcase natural talent.
No. Only a 'scandal' seemed to shake us awake. Is that how it is?
I think we all knew better, but needed an excuse to say so.
Perhaps the truth is ugly.
Somehow, in America, we have convinced ourselves that proof is not proof enough unless it  highlights some code we've collectively manufactured.
Common sense can't seem to align itself with reality or probabilities for a discovery here.  Instead, reality must align itself with some code determined to undermine common sense, even common knowledge.
Codes are not conducive to being discovered because they are easily devised and discarded.
Common sense, common knowledge has to be accumulated over time, it is controlled by time.
Truth and reality are a bit different.  Each exists in the vacuum of a kind of timelessness for every second in which it is actually experienced.
If a baby is born at midnight on August 7th, he or she will be born at that time according to how we
measure time right now, right in this moment.
If we change the way we measure time, that baby will not have been born differently.  The real day,
date, and time of the birth will always be available to be discovered if there is ever a question of the
birth facts.
However, common sense will have to come into play if we change the way we measure and describe time on August 6, 2013 so that a man or woman who needs a heart valve replaced in 2043 appears to be sixty, but is described as a child.
Someone will look for a reality, a truth about this person's birth that is not simply coded to be called
'yesterday'.
However, in order to do that, the someone looking would have to be willing to enlist common sense.
The  cognitive tools we employ to 'discover' have to be those we must admit are uniquely tailored for discovery.
And yet discovery is unnecessary for  those of us unwilling to value reality. 
If  I care nothing for the relationship between truth and reality, then why not let practically anybody tell me practically anything? If a thing seems real, I would like to know or at least suspect the probability that it is the truth. Normally, I don't prefer to believe a mirage is real.
So, if we know from common sense that dopers are doping, what is at stake, and where is that something at stake for us not to want to admit we aren't actually duped by doping possibilities?
We need cultural shifts in our willingness to be publicly 'fooled' if we don't expect to raise a
generation of pathological liars. Or do we feel some realities are too distasteful to accept publicly?
Young people experiment, even if only mentally, with where they'd like to fit in in the wide wide world. They will choose early on whether they want to exploit their natural abilities, or their chemically enhanced possibilities. They may use faulty pros and cons to think through the decisions
if common sense risks and benefits are not questioned.
Tom Brady didn't want to be an insurance salesman simply because his dad was an insurance salesman.
He wanted to be a quarterback when he looked into the world and found some people grew up to be
NFL quarterbacks.
If a child were to have discovered a guy has to dope and lie about it in order to get that job, he still might quite likely have wanted to be a quarterback, especially if he believed it would be fine to camouflage what he may have to do if people generally agreed it was fine to look away.
Baseball hasn't proven to be much different than cycling has become.
Some people have said A-Rod isn't taking the drugs which could help his performance.
Some say his performance hasn't even changed much over time.
The thing is- we do know how much change over a given amount of time is too much change to be natural.
If we want dopers in baseball, we can easily have that.
We have encouraged it. People seem to grow magically- and we clap.
Plenty of American kids loved playing baseball in the sixties and seventies.  They were both creative
and competitive.
However, so many of them were American black kids. Oddly enough, they were not welcome in American baseball. Baseball authorities searched far and wide in the hemisphere for powerful pitchers and hitters in spite of all Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson did to reverse racial trends in awarding baseball contracts here.
We have always had black players, of course; but our American luck was that just when qualified black players could have gotten more attention in the majors, they were deemed not meek enough
to sustain the audience players like Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella could survive.
The Civil Rights Movement was going full steam ahead every day right when black players could
have made quiet inroads into pro baseball.
The time wasn't quite right for the introduction of a lot of new black players into the majors.
Then came Hank Aaron.
He did prove a black baseball star could not be meek enough.
He tried to be nice.
He tried to be quiet.
He tried to be the guy getting his job done to the best of his ability.
But all this happened in the 70s.
As the seventies rolled along, I proceeded to become more and more horrified about the events
surrounding Mr. Aaron's success.
I was one who refused to believe the intimidation reports coming in about fans.
What were they so angry about?
Babe Ruth's record.
I had no idea Americans didn't know they weren't actually superior simply because they preached themselves to be so. Of course that record would be challenged when black players entered the
league!
Hank Aaron kept wanting to quit. He could barely stand the terror of steadily approaching that record.
He said the abuse from the fans and the constant death threats all day and all night was daunting.
I was devastated. I remembered Jackie Robinson's trials.
Later, I got Mr. Robinson's book, to re-read it, to see if I remembered it all correctly.
Sure enough, fans were spitting tobacco on him, spitting on him period, throwing urine and whatever
else on him. Sadness ensues when reading those accounts.
Then I read Hank Aaron's story.
I couldn't see what had changed.
I got the sense Babe Ruth's record was simply the catalyst to push fans from a tolerance I'd mistaken
for acceptance in baseball land.
There would not have been half so many people wanting to actually threaten death to a Caucasian player who was closing in on Ruth's record. Why did it make so much difference?
My heart was broken when I realized how glad Aaron was to get out of his game.
Americans may never be ready for the reality of the truth about competitive human abilities in black
America.
I can imagine what Barry Bonds may have been thinking when he realized his natural talent might
portray as seriously compromised by people artificially propped up to seem believably superior.
He of course had a baseball star dad, so he may have experienced two panics, one personal, one generational.
This is America.
Don't believe it.
You don't have to believe it.


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