For Love or Money- Listen to the Heart

from Michael Bungay Stanier's email newsletter, Outside the Lines, came these two quotes yesterday...

"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature."
-Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychiatrist

"Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him, and then choose that way with all his strength."
-Hasidic Saying

Little did I know that these would have a meaning in today's top news story on all three networks' evening news shows.

Baseball and Steroids. The Mitchell Report has been released and while it is not a surprise to most baseball watchers, it is big news. If we lived in a different age this would make the "Black Sox Scandal" of the early 20th Century look like a Sunday School picnic. I think in many ways it will make or break some real issues in baseball today. Will they "scapegoat" one or two or will they come down hard and heavy? Will Major League Baseball "bite the bullet" and do what's right or will it be another hypocrisy reminiscent of their response to Pete Rose?

Bonds. Clemens. Giambi. Tejada. Vaughan. Pettite. Name after name. (USA TODAY link.) As some have said, it is an All-Star roster. Lawyers are already involved. MLB will be cautious.

And baseball will be tainted. Or at least it should be. This is NOT a pretty picture. It is one mroe example of the extreme that occurs when money and greed and our human desire to be great and to be entertained by those who are larger-than-life takes over. That's why those quotes I received yesterday are so powerful in this context (as well as others, of course.)

Freud might say that these decisions to use steroids has been spawned by our inner human nature- but not our better nature. We can be led by that inner sense in good and bad ways. Be bigger and more powerful. Or be a better human being. Make lots and lots of money or stand on the sidelines and watch.

But the heart, the true and hopeful heart is another story. The true heart is one that knows right from wrong and that in the end we are lesser people if we choose the "wrong." Whether we get caught or not, we are diminished when we hold back on our secrets, when we betray our own better nature- the heart- and follow the other ways. We lose some of our humanity- and sadly we may never even know it's gone.

I hope that this report is not just another 15-minutes of infamy and then we, the baseball loving crowd and the headline loving news and the money loving owners, go back to the way things have been. A slap on the wrist here; a nod and wink there. Bonds already has the reputation, let him be a scapegoat. Clemens is a courageous pitcher, look the other way.

It can't happen that way. The record book that baseball and its fans revere will have a new cover that is simply a question mark and an asterisk.