We have become a nation of euphemism dispensers, as reality increasingly is sugarcoated to make it go down more easily.
Garbage men are sanitation engineers. Handicapped people are differently enabled. Participation trophies have replaced awards for the winners.
Even in supposed meritocracies such as professional sports, there are euphemisms bandied about.
I spent a lot of time covering pro football, specifically the Pittsburgh Steelers, and every summer many a player was cut from the roster and sent packing from preseason training camp with the soothing words of “it was just the numbers game” ringing in their ears.
This was supposed to ease the blow to their pride, with the implication being that they had talent, but if only the players had been at a different position, where the number of proven players was not as great, they might have made the roster.
Reality, implied but left unsaid, was that if they’d have been good enough, they’d have displaced those proven players and there would have been different victims of the numbers game.
I’m not sure, but now maybe these roster cuts get participation trophies as parting gifts
As an aside, the member of the staff charged with notifying players who were about to be cut, to come see the coach and bring their playbook, generally was, and is, labeled “The Turk.”
This is a title which surprisingly has endured in this era of racism sensitivity, be the racism real, perceived or imagined.
In a bit of irony, Steelers offensive tackle Tunch Ilkin, an actual Turk who was born in Istanbul in 1957, never got a visit from the metaphorical Turk, playing for the Steelers and Green Bay Packers before retiring of his own volition in 1993.
The numbers game – non-football variety – is prevalent as 2020 dodders toward 2021.
Begin with insipid utterances of so many that 2021 has to be better than 2020, and not just because it is one digit higher.
These optimists without portfolio forget that the calendar is an artificial construction, not recognized by forces of distress.
A Harris-Biden administration could make 2020 look like the good, old days, should they be able to accomplish remaking our country into a dystopian nightmare.
While working 20 years at the Johnstown newspaper, such misplaced optimism broke out any time the chain ownership, which had come on board relatively late in my run there, played musical chairs with the editors.
The new people surely would be better than what we had, the underlings mused. They never were.
This sort of misplaced optimism was summed up neatly by an executive for Bethlehem Steel, then the major employer in Johnstown, who succinctly told the populace to expect the worst and it never would be disappointed.
Not that many years later, Bethlehem Steel was bankrupt and gone from Johnstown.
We got a curious numbers game release today when Gallup announced President Trump had topped its annual Most Admired Man poll garnering 18 percent. Joe Biden, the man who ostensibly had beaten Trump in the recent election, came in at a lusty 6 percent.
Biden even trailed significantly runner-up Barack Obama (15 percent) and had a modest edge over Dr. Tony Fauci (3 percent) who is the relatively unpopular face of lockdown America.
Experts in statistics and probability have studied the November election and concluded that it is improbable – more like virtually impossible — that Biden won the election in view of the way the voting totals could be broken down against previous benchmarks.
But Biden appears to have beaten the Turk and won the numbers game.
Another numbers game is the ongoing stimulus debate.
There had been numerous studies, even before COVID-19 and the economic shutdowns, that the average American household was running on fumes financially
One study that was reported in Forbes magazine on Jan. 6, 2016, said 63 percent of those households didn’t have $500 in savings to meet an unexpected expense.
Presumably many of those are the same people who in late 2020 are decrying that a $600 stimulus check per person isn’t nearly enough for them.
Even given inflationary adjustments, $600 now is more than $500 in 2016. And that is not $600 per household, but rather $600 per household member, making a total of $2,400 for the typical four-person grouping.
For these people, even the proposed $2,000 a head/$8,000 per family, would not be enough. But that is more a reflection of their poor spending habits than anything else.
Do not forget, the government early in 2020 had handed out $1,200 stimulus checks per adult and $600 per child.
Remember, too, that those who have lost their jobs have for some time enjoyed extended and enhanced unemployment benefits on top of any stimulus payments doled out by the federal government.
For some people, this meant that they made more when not working. Stories appeared in the media of workers being upset over callbacks to their jobs.
These increased unemployment benefits are likely to be continued in one form or another in coming days or weeks, just as additional stimulus payments are coming, of one size or another.
The resulting parabolic increase in the United States national debt is the ignored, but still relevant, consequence of the handouts
It is our national numbers game. The Turk eventually will come calling.
Sam Ross Jr's site 