Everybody has a camera…well, almost everybody. Thanks to cell phones, we can be recorded in still or video formats almost every second of the day. We are our own Big Brother. So much so, in fact, that it is hard to muster too much fright and indignation over increasing use of public cameras by the government. Boston police, for example, now have immediate access to street video of shootings, robberies, and homicides on many city streets, and use real time images to send information about the suspects and crimes to responding officers. Continue reading
Boston
The Ethics of Bigotry, Part III:Tom Yawkey’s Red Sox Racism, and How Not to Prove It
Tom Yawkey owned the Boston Red Sox for four decades and his wife Jean owned them for one more; it is accurate to say that he was the most influential individual in the storied team’s existence. Yawkey bought the team in the mid-Thirties, after it had suffered through one of the worse stretches of awful play on record, sparked by an earlier owner’s fire sale of its best players, including Babe Ruth. Yawkey ran the Red Sox with an open checkbook and a stated objective of giving the city of Boston the best championship money could buy. Soon the once-pathetic team was fielding all-time greats like Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a brash young phenom named Ted Williams. By the time Yawkey died in 1976, the Red Sox had one of the largest, most loyal and fanatic fan bases in sports, and the team was entrenched in New England culture. Boston remains properly grateful, and the re-naming of the street outside Fenway Park “Yawkey Way” is no perfunctory tribute. (The names of Yawkey and his wife Jean are spelled out, vertically, in Morse Code on the famous hand-operated scoreboard on Fenway Park’s left field wall.
The Red Sox came close, but they never won that World Championship under Yawkey. One of the primary reasons was that the Yawkey way was racist. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 