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At What Cost?
In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these:
A righteous man perishing in his righteousness,
And a wicked man living long in his wickedness.
________________________—Ecclesiastes 7:15
Morality, they say, was made for fools
Who think that they can win by playing fair.
But why subscribe to ancient, stone-carved rules
When cheaters seem to prosper everywhere?
The place where cheating seems to be the worst
Is sports, where athletes must be strong and fast.
For some, a pill helps them to come in first,
While nice guys all too often finish last.
So, go ahead, give in to greed and lust,
And do your dirty work behind the scenes.
It isn’t “evil” if your cause is “just,”
Your ends will always justify your means.
To buy Olympic gold (if that’s your goal),
Just pay the going rate and sell your soul.
.
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James A. Tweedie is a retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He has written and published six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry including Mostly Sonnets, all with Dunecrest Press. His poems have been published nationally and internationally in The Lyric, Poetry Salzburg (Austria) Review, California Quarterly, Asses of Parnassus, Lighten Up Online, Better than Starbucks, WestWard Quarterly, Society of Classical Poets, and The Chained Muse.
It’s almost impossible now to prevent professional athletes (or anyone else) from taking performance-enhancing drugs. There are too many of such drugs, and not all of them are easy to trace. For this reason, in the future all Olympic performance records from the last forty years or so will have to be asterisked as unsubstantiated or debatable.
A major existential fact is that human physical performance is limited as to how far it can go. Nobody is going to do the hundred-meter dash in three seconds. But as fractions of seconds are chipped away from every previous record, one reaches a point of no return in terms of achievement. The human desire to get the tiny extra edge will drive athletes to take drugs. It’s as simple as that.
The more important concern should be the invasion of female sports by biological males who claim to have “changed their gender and sex” by legally-protected self-fiat, and who thereby win awards that they would NEVER have won against actual male competitors. That practice is base, selfish, contemptible, and corrupting — but of course it is protected by trans-gender ideological absolutes that are asserted as unquestioned dogma.
Mr Tweedie, the name Lance Armstrong immediately comes to mind. I followed him for years until the dirty truth came out. Our celebrity sports people can hide their dirty work as you say. The latest from over here is that one of our pampered pro-footballers has just been outed on social media for kicking his own cat. The real shock was that he has been fined a whopping £250,000 which I assumed was his annual salary, but it turns out that this is just two weeks pay. A most thoughtful read. Thank you.
The second stanza pretty much sums up the entire poem. I understand well how sometimes a fortunate confluence of rhyme pairs appears as if out of thin air. The important thing is that you were ready when the moment came.
This is an excellent elaboration on the complaint from Ecclesiastes. I’ve always been grateful for the way The Preacher expounds upon life’s frustrations and agonies; and you’ve captured his spirit here, applying it to the sad state of our competitive sports.
Your point about enhanced performance in sport through drugs is valid,
topical, and a sad reflection of modern times.
I agree with Joe S. though that this transgender rubbish is even worse. The attention afforded by the media to the sick trend of changing gender by say-so is, in my opinion, what feeds the fashion.
Thanks for your timely poem.
‘It isn’t “evil” if your cause is “just”…’
A fantastic summing up of the era we’re living through.