What if Sacramento loses the Kings, the Railyards, and Cal Expo, and DTP all in one year?

[Curmudgeon]

At this stage of the game and in this economy, will anyone notice, much less really care? I think there's more focus and emphasis on personal survival.

[wburg]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

At this stage of the game and in this economy, will anyone notice, much less really care? I think there's more focus and emphasis on personal survival.

Personal survival depends largely on the ability of communities to survive together. As much as people want to crow about "rugged individualism," we are a social animal, and our ability to do pretty much anything is based on groups. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

During the Great Depression, when you might expect people to focus only on personal survival, entertainment and sports formed a huge part of public attention: movies, radio and baseball were enormously popular. People were desperate for heroes and role models. (One might question whether today's sports figures constitute heroes and role models, but if the first-hand accounts I have read about past sports figures are any indication, they were always foul-mouthed, hard-drinking womanizers.)

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by wburg

Personal survival depends largely on the ability of communities to survive together. As much as people want to crow about "rugged individualism," we are a social animal, and our ability to do pretty much anything is based on groups. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

During the Great Depression, when you might expect people to focus only on personal survival, entertainment and sports formed a huge part of public attention: movies, radio and baseball were enormously popular. People were desperate for heroes and role models. (One might question whether today's sports figures constitute heroes and role models, but if the first-hand accounts I have read about past sports figures are any indication, they were always foul-mouthed, hard-drinking womanizers.)

That's not too far from the truth. But they were also clean-cut, clean-shaven, uninked, mostly educated and received comparitively paltry pay for playing the games and did so for the love of them. Few, if any, reportably, were drug users, abusers, or other forms of the criminal element. Now it's all about big bucks, star power and overpayment leading to admissions tickets well out of the range of all too many family's ability to pay.