Career Profiling

Posted on March 11, 2004 by Gene

Once again, Congress wants to penalize one visible group over all others. Just like in the practice of racial profiling, the powers-that-be figure that if you are a baseball player you are more likely to abuse illegal drugs — steroids. Thus, they want to mandate drug testing for players.
If you remember, this is one of the “issues” that Dubya mentioned in his State of the Union address. Yeah, a really pressing problem we have in this country, our professional baseball players. Whatever.
Of course, none of this is new. Congress wants to appear relevant and active.
I sometimes feel like a Vulcan when I look around at what the government is doing — it’s all so illogical and steeped in emotion. I mean, look at the logic of this situation: how many professional baseball players are they in the U.S., and how many of them are using illegal steroids? And how many regular Americans are using them? I mean, the regular Americans using them must outnumber the famous, highly-paid baseball players by a huge factor, right? So, why isn’t Congress thinking of mandating drug tests for any muscle-bound guy rather than the small number of baseball players?
Government by logic. That would be a strange thing, wouldn’t it?