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State Rep. Phil Pankey, a Littleton Republican, has proposed a daring new strategy to fight drugs. In order to play for a professional sports team based in Colorado, an athlete would be required to get a license from the state health department. If he wasn't clean, no license.
Pro leagues already employ strict drug-testing programs,
and our bumbling state health department is one of those
outfits that gives government bureaucracies a bad name. But
Pankey says we must license athletes anyway: They carry
a tremendous amount of influence with our young people.
They need to set examples within our society.
You might wonder what kind of example it sets when a role model abjures controlled substances, not because he cares, but because he'll lose his high-paying job. One would like to believe that heroes act from personal conviction, rather than to keep their paychecks.
You also might wonder at the intelligence of youths who pick major-league athletes as role models. There are 246 million Americans, of whom 650 are professional baseball players, 230 basketball players and 1400 football players -- 2,280 major leaguers, about 0.0009 percent of the population. A kid has a much better chance of becoming a brain surgeon.
Those athletes spent their youth risking crippling injuries as they prepared incessantly for a career that lasts, on average, less than four years. A kid who thinks that's a wonderful life is not likely to amount to much anyway, drugs or no drugs.
But the real problem is that the Pankey proposal just doesn't go far enough.
At least half the kids in Colorado are girls, who might admire certain athletes, but it is difficult to believe that their role models are linebackers and power forwards. Besides, potential role models are hardly limited to organized leagues of teams. What of ski racers, tennis players, race-car drivers, bowlers, golfers, boxers, skaters, rodeo cowboys, swimmers and wrestlers?
Why isn't Pankey requiring them to get role-model licenses? Doesn't he care that some feeble-minded youth might be led astray by idolizing a professional wrestler who can't pass a urine test?
This youthful role-model business extends far beyond sports. When I recall my own childhood heroes and realize now that they could not have met the Pankey licensing provisions for role models, it is no wonder that I grew up so depraved: Thomas Jefferson, who grew tobacco and made homebrew; Benjamin Franklin, a philanderer; Thomas Edison, a cocaine user; Sinclair Lewis, an alcoholic; H.L. Mencken, a scofflaw; Clarence Darrow, a chain-smoker and tippler.
Pankey's insipid proposal doesn't cover statesmen, inventors, writers or attorneys, nor any of the dozens of other heros and heroines that misguided children might choose: agitators, preachers, actors and actresses, musicians, soldiers, explorers, painters, sculptors, philosophers, industrialists.
This is just another half-baked notion that doesn't go
far enough. We need to establish a Colorado Role Model
Licensing Board. As soon as any child is heard to say
I'd like to be like So-and-So when I grow up,
the
board would launch a thorough investigation.
If purity were established, then the role model could appear on television, sell posters, promote books and enjoy the other rewards of celebrity. But if the potential hero came up short, we could borrow a trick from Stalin and declare an un-person: no public appearances, records banned from the radio, all photos and text references airbrushed and clipped, etc.
That hasn't been the American way, but are we serious about good role models or not?
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