Heeheeheehoo

In our ongoing discussion of stress, I’ve seen/heard a fairly consistent theme, which is that we should actively work to avoid and reduce it. To me, the rationale behind this would be fairly straightforward: in stressful situations, our bodies react, which over time, can have profound impacts on our health. And in many situations, I would agree that avoiding stress or finding ways to lessen its physical impact is the best thing to do. To me, though, there are two main categories of stressors, which I try to deal with differently: those that can be eliminated or lessened through your actions and those that can’t.

If, for example, I accidentally throw my phone off a bridge, I may be stressed because I would like for my phone to be in my pocket. Unfortunately, though, there is really not much I can do about the fact that it is now at the bottom of a river. In this situation, for me, the best response is to try to not worry about it and to relieve any stress that it has caused me—any physical reactions I might get from this aren’t going to do anything about the fact that my phone is at the bottom of the river, so there’s no benefit to them.

Say I’m taking an exam and I care about its outcome (in this scenario, let’s assume a desirable outcome is one in which you get a high score). Now, let’s suppose that I’m taking the exam and I look up to see that there are 5 minutes left and I still haven’t started the last question. This makes me stressed. In this scenario, if I act in a certain way (solve the last question) I could be less stressed when the exam is over. If I act in a different way (say, turn in the exam immediately after checking the time), I will likely be more stressed after having done so. As opposed to in the first scenario, here I do have the power to eliminate this stressor (by answering the first question). In my opinion, being stressed (or rather, having the physical reactions of it) in this kind of situation is a great thing. If your heart pumps faster, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, etc., your body is rising to the challenge and providing you the resources you need to succeed. In my opinion, the worst thing I could do in this situation would be to try to calm myself down or reduce the physical reaction—by taking deep breaths, for example.

If we can learn to embrace stress and the physical reactions it causes in situations like these, I think we can also avoid a lot of negative emotions we experience in anticipation of stress. Some people tend to get stressed before exams or social situations, for example, because they’re scared of being stressed in the moment. Understanding that (at least in some respects) stress is a good and helpful reaction to pressure could help calm some of these negative emotions.

What do you think?

-Kevin

NCAA Part II (Duane)

Thank you all for your positive feedback on my last post! Although I probably got the general points across, I feel like taking more time to explain the nuances of the NCAA and their rules and provide some context for the current debates in sports.

For starters, let’s talk about college football. College football is often considered the primary moneymaker for almost every major school. A majority of the money comes from lucrative TV contracts through ESPN, CBS, or FOX. I don’t think anybody has any issues with the universities making exorbitant sums of money off these contracts, as most of the money goes to salaries, scholarships, basic team needs (uniforms, hotels for away games, flights, etc) and athletic facility upgrades for the sports who couldn’t afford it otherwise. What’s important to note here is that the money for the athletic programs is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the university’s general funding. Therefore, these student athletes aren’t taking away resources from the academic programs of the university. Anyway, I digress…

With football in particular, the NFL enacted a rule that doesn’t allow players to be drafted until 3 years after they graduate high school. From a rational standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Football is a highly physical game, and having 18 year olds being tackled by grown men at full speed sounds like a recipe for disaster. As sports fans saw this year with the failure of the AAF (an alternative football leave), it is virtually impossible to create a professional football league to compete with the NFL. That leaves college football as the only option for a recent high school graduate. Although this isn’t true for a majority of players, truly elite high school football players have to twiddle their thumbs in college for 3 years before they can be paid for their abilities. The coaches and athletic departments often put winning over education, as their exorbitant salaries are dependent on how many games they win. Because of this, these kids are often steered into programs like “General Studies” or “Recreation, Sport, and Tourism”. These degrees provide arguably the least return on investment of any career path in the school. What this means is that the student-athletes aren’t getting their money’s worth out of their education. Add to this the fact that college athletics is a significant time commitment (30+ hours a week), and you can see how the pure system of “education for athletics” has been exploited.

College basketball follows similar guidelines. However, college basketball players are only required to stay one year in college. Given the basketball season ends in March, they effectively only have to stay one semester to be eligible for the NBA Draft. Because basketball is an international game, there are various other leagues in Europe/Asia that will pay players. The NBA even has a development league, called the NBA G League (G for Gatorade in the name of corporate America).This system gives the players more agency than their football counterparts, but the system itself coerces players into college as many scouts believe European basketball is drastically different than that of the NBA. Although these systems don’t explicitly force players to play college sports, society dictates they do.

However, these issues involve a rare subset of individuals in college sports. For most sports, the education is more relevant. The prevalence of Title IX has actually made a huge impact on the non-revenue sports. Title IX states that resources for men and women must be the same, and this relates to athletic department finances. Since a football team has 85 scholarships, the women’s sports need significantly more scholarships to even it out. But, because these sports don’t have revenue, the NCAA arbitrarily “caps” total scholarships at different values to provide “balance”. However, the Title IX “balance” means that neither the men’s nor women’s non-revenue programs adequately support their genuine student-athletes. Golf, for example, is capped at 4.5 scholarships for men and 6 for women. Often, these teams will have anywhere from 7-12 players, which means most of these players are on at most partial scholarships. Football and basketball, on the other hand, pretty much guarantees their players will get full academic scholarships all 4 years on campus. What ends up happening is NCAA rules prohibit the majority of student-athletes who actually use their sports to gain a real education from attaining full scholarships. Rather, this money goes to players who are just biding their time until they can enter the lucrative professional leagues and don’t effectively leverage their free education.

So how do we fix this? Perhaps the best solution is that employed by college baseball and the MLB. High school baseball players are allowed to immediately be drafted right out of college. However, if they do not choose to sign, they must wait 3 years before they are eligible to be drafted again. Under these rules, NCAA teams would actually be getting players who are interested in getting an education, as those who don’t have interest in school would just turn professional out of high school. Another great solution would be that used by the NHL and college hockey. NHL teams draft players while they’re in college. However, until they actually decide to turn professional, the NHL team has the “rights” to that player. Their contract control also doesn’t begin (usually there is a minimum contract length) until after they turn professional. Some of their money is also guaranteed, which means players can earn some of their value in the event they get injured while in college. A surprising amount of college hockey players come from Ivy League schools, and this system allows them to continue to pursue their educations without having to worry about their professional futures.

As you can see, the debate of NCAA control is far more nuanced than it seems on the surface. There is growing support of these changes in the media. The NBA is already rumored to have eliminated their single year rule before the 2023 NBA season. However, it is up to the NCAA and their respective professional sports leagues to further resolve these issues before players begin taking their talents elsewhere.

The Police

Out of the three novels, the police from The Parable of the Sower have stuck out to me the most and felt the most like the police we have today. Maybe it was because the police from The Handmaid's Tail and 1984 have different names than just "the police." However, some aspects of the way the police act are very reminiscent of our own police. For example, Lauren accuses the police (although not to their faces) of "finding evidence" to convict whoever they decide is guilty. This definitely seemed like a critique on the corruption within our police system. More specifically, the police's habit of getting false confessions out of people in order to close cases and ensure they keep making money. In many communities (especially in some poor African-American communities), the police will find a way to get a confession out of an innocent person by offering them a shorter sentence if they confess. In these communities accepting these shortened terms is actually a better deal than going to court and losing (which they often do even when they're innocent--maybe because of racism but that's a different issue). It's even become quite common in some of these communities to spend a lot of time in jail having never committed a crime.

Additionally, the lack of cooperation with police from the community and the distrust of the police by the community remind me a lot of the way our own justice system works. The blatant corruption and the public knowledge of the police's tendency to wrongfully convict (or kill) people causes a lot of animosity towards the police. This kind of animosity creates a system where very few people actually trust the police. (For example, even for me as a white guy who also looks pretty harmless, my dad has always told me to avoid police and talking to police at all). This applies especially to certain communities where people just run when they see the police, whether or not they've done anything.

The final thing that reminds me a lot of our society from the parable of the sower is how expensive the police are. In a lot of situations, a functional police force can be a necessary thing to have. They can even save lives. To me, this doesn't remind me of our actual justice system (although court fees are a thing and lawyers also cost money so maybe it's not too far off) it reminds me a lot of our healthcare system which costs way too much and causes people to just not go to the doctor when they're sick. Anyway, what do you guys think, am I reading too much into this or are the police from The Parable if the Sower very similar to our own?