We are a forgiving people. It’s one of America’s most redeeming qualities.
You screw up —> you come clean —> you apologize —> you are forgiven by most, if not all.
That’s the way it is supposed to work and more often than not that is exactly the way it does work, with a life cycle so short that one’s mind quickly deletes the bad times, the hurt, the damage, the anger.
Looking forward. Seeing the good in the world. Yes and yes.
But what happened yesterday afternoon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin makes no damn sense. When admitted cheater and liar Ryan Braun returned to the Brewers after his 2013 performance enhancing drug 65-game suspension, he received a thunderous standing ovation from the crowd at Miller Park. Watch it here. I get it, I do, he was a transcendent player even before the chemical enhancements, and it is a net-positive for your favorite team to have his bat and glove and speed slotted comfortably back in the 3-hole in the potent Brewers lineup, but how can this particular individual, this national pariah, be welcomed back so quickly and so lovingly? For Braun’s true crime was a most heinous brand of cheating and lying: obnoxiously defiant in his innocence to his friends, teammates, bosses, fans, and to the public at large, and absolutely worst of all, what separates him from his cheating peers, is that Ryan Braun willingly attempted to ruin the life and livelihood of another man to escape the consequences of his actions.
I have no interest in judging Braun for the how’s, when’s, and why’s of his PED usage. Whatever. But to purposely try to destroy the credibility and good-name of another professional, to knowingly impact their life and the life of their family in a public and negative way? That’s too terrible to delete in the relative blinking of an eye, even one looking the other way. What Braun did to Dino Laurenzi is not an unforgivable sin, but it absolutely should not have been forgiven so swiftly and with a hero’s welcome on Opening Day.
