Expensive speech

I’ve been talking to a few people and they say to me, “Must be hard finding something to write about isn’t it?” When it gets down to sports topics it sure seems that way. I’m not a NASCAR expert or big fan so watching an entire race is a bit much but I bet I saw at least a half hour of it on Sunday. But after a couple of wrecks and flipping through the channels I almost missed the wild last two laps.

The race sort of reminded me of a trip my wife and I made to Spokane on Friday. It’s amazing there isn’t someone with a yellow caution flag as you enter the city from the top of sunset hill. It would be nice as traffic enters from Highway 2 and slingshots their way across three lanes of traffic. But slowing down would mean surrendering.

It looks like baseball will be back with a shortened 60 game schedule starting Thursday, July 23rd. So ESPN will have something more to broadcast besides Sportscenter and politics. The Mariners will begin their season on the road in Houston against the cheating Astros. Well, they were caught. It has been so long since that fiasco was brought to light that maybe some people forgot about it. Most Major League teams certainly haven’t.

So there will be 60 games played this year and I’m not sure if fans will be able to attend at some point in time or limits on fans will be in place but at least we will get to see the games on TV and not worry about $20 parking and traffic jams.

People certainly are touchy these days by that I mean offended easily. There was a time in this great country when we had freedom of speech. And if you said something stupid people ignored you and you no longer had any friends. Then you started to realize that you should never use your inside voice in public as you could tick someone off rather easily. But then the other person could let go and tell you exactly what they thought of your ignorance when your inside voice escaped.

With social media today there are a lot of people whose voice is sent out on Facebook or on Twitter for millions of people to eventually see. How many times have you started a text or email and as you start rereading the message you think better of hitting the send button or hit enter.

I think that instead of people losing their jobs over something they said yesterday, last year or 30 years ago we should go back to the good old time-tested cuss jar. Now we never had one in our house but I heard about a lot of those jars sitting around the house and when someone went on a snit fit and the four letter words started spewing money would flow into the jar. Depending on the nastiness of the word it could be a quarter, half dollar or a dollar for each time those words were said. I’m sure that more than one family vacation was financed on dad’s inner voice making the air waves.

Maybe we should start doing that same thing today. Fines for saying really offensive things could simply have a cost. And, of course everyone would be subjected to these fines. A fine could be more expensive on Twitter and Facebook or other social media outlets than a simple text or email. The more people that would see it the more the fine would be. And since it would be as quick as the time you ran a red light that showed your picture in a vehicle in Spokane, you would be expected to pay quickly as well.

Sounds kind of corny doesn’t it. Kind of like what is happening now. One person loses a job for something said 30 years ago while another is suspended for two weeks for something that seemed far more offensive doesn’t quite add up. But that is the nature of the political arena these days.

So getting back to the cussing jar again would let us know that we really don’t have free speech to deal with but rather expensive speech. Maybe then we would think twice about hitting send from our devices or our mouths.