Massachusetts Hockey Says 'Severe' Ref Shortage Is Due To Abuse From Parents, Coaches And Players

[Moostache]

1. A long while ago I was a youth baseball umpire...

I did it at first in high school and college for little leaguers and softball. Then I got into travelling teams and high schools and was out of umpiring within a year - and this was 28 years ago now...today? With the evils of social media and the incredible over-entitlement of kids AND parents? There is not enough money in the world to make that loss of human decency and personal dignity worth sacrificing.

Our society is profoundly sick, and one of the accelerants of this disease and incivility is anti-social media. Facebook is a Mean Girls burn book gone viral for all...Instagram is body dysmorphia and crystallized deadly sins for freaking teens....Twitter is Goebbels's worst desires brought to life - a consequence-free, all pervasive propaganda machine with the ability to make good people do horrible things FREELY.

The best thing that could happen today - well, second best, because the best thing every day until it happens is Donald Trump dying of an excruciating accidental death - would be a complete loss of ALL social media apps forever. It is concentrated poison, marketed to children and addictive personalities and used to warp minds to cause people to "need" the feedback, the adulation, the fake lives and he over-glorification of wealth to promote consumption.

Things have always had bad actors - like unruly parents and entitled kids - but there is a megaphone now that did not previously exist and that is social media amplification.