Are we in trouble or what?  Sports fans are wondering, "What's going on?  Major League Baseball's revered records hoary with age are falling and suspicions rise so high that the U. S. Congress convenes a special committee to investigate. Before the august committee, some players go mute, saying, "We didn't come here to talk about the past." Selective memory and historical amnesia set in.  The Richter scale of suspicion rockets off the chart at such remarks and Alzheimer moments.

Journalists and players put poison pen to paper and write tell-all books describing players and needles combining to attack records once thought sacrosanct.  Players, once lean and trim, suddenly are standing in the batter's box as if auditioning for The Green Hulk.  Once sinewy, they stand there positively bionic.  Those once wiry, are now photographable for the cover of "Muscle Monthly."

The fans and the sports writers cry, "Foul!  It's not right!"    The great Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio didn't "enhance."  Maris and Mantle didn't become pin cushions, their veins conduits for steroids.  In the tear-filled words (most likely apocryphal) of the unknown boy on the Chicago street, "Say it ain't so, Joe!"

Basketball is baseball's twin sister in trouble.  Those who attended some basketball games now know they never did.  It wasn't a real game; a referee fixed it, blowing his whistle on a lane violation here, a foul there, certain technical fouls, and ejections so all would go according the gamblers' script.  The fans weren't watching a basketball game; they were watching a bookie's ballet.  The commissioner, stunned at the news of such betrayal of the sport, goes on national TV, looks exhausted, vents his wrath and says, "This is wrong and will be dealt with!"

But now the sisters are triplets in trouble.  The National Football League discovers charges of sadistic and criminal behavior in its hallowed ranks.  The image of the role model is in ashes.  Paid magnified millions to pass and run, somehow that's not enough.  For more thrills there are animals trained and then watched as they chew each other's flesh.  There are animals to execute for failure to do their brutal duty as thousands of dollars change hands. The millions don't sate; only death, gore, flying fur, and blood can quench the thirst.

Demonstrations erupt as organizations put their frenzied minions on the street and those who once heard the roar and the cheer in the domes of America now endure the hostile jeers and boos.   People who neither know nor care for sports join the outrage.  Their moral stance demands such ones be brought low, humiliated, and sentenced by the courts.

Commentators use words like "vile," "disgusting." One talking head said it flat-out: "Evil."

Suspicions, charges, indictments, congressional hearings, courtrooms, disgrace, demonstrations, pleas, and fines consume the sports pages as irate writers gnash their teeth on pen and paper, leaving furious fans wondering, "Whatever happened to baseball, hog dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet?"

No matter the sport; the cry goes out, "Wrong.  Wrong. Wrong. Deal with it   The guilty must be punished and the sooner the better!  Justice now; we demand it!"

But wait a minute.  The human race is an odd bunch, a collection of walking, talking inconsistencies. Thorough-going relativists to the core are now talking about right and wrong, evil, a person's vileness and the need for justice?  Where'd all that come from?

We've been told for decades that there are no absolutes, but all of a sudden, by magic, now there are? Where'd that come from?  In relativism, isn't one man's poison another man's sport?  To each his own.  Who are we to say?  In relativism, the categories don't exist any more, yet here they are throwing around such terms as "right" and "justice," and "wrong," as they deal with good and evil.

But on the evolutionary scale of things, aren't we just higher animals watching lower animals kill each other?  On the evolutionary scale of things "right" and "wrong" have no anchor except in what the whimsical majority says or a select group says.

One other thing.  These same relativists recoil in throw-up-your-hands-horror at the very idea of a God who'll judge the human race.  Yet we want the books balanced; we give ourselves the right to call it fair or foul.  We say things aren't fair or right and they must be adjudicated, but He can't?

The days of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet are long gone; relativism has buried them, but every so often things so outrageous come along that remind us that one cannot be a consistent relativist.  God didn't build us that way.

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