The Majestic Mercy Point (a ping pong blog)

​     I was being beaten really bad. Nary a point for me towards the end of the game.  Now I consider that a case of depraved indifference.  The guy who is depraved, you should understand, is the guy doing the whipping (i.e., not me).  Don’t confuse that person with the guy stinkin’ up the joint (eh, that would be me).  C’mon, getting beaten 10-0 and on the way to a schneid (= losing without a point), you shouldn’t do that to another human being.  Give ‘em at least a mercy point, some kind of consolation prize to leave with (like they do on the TV game shows).  Let the loser at least preserve some small amount of dignity … so that he doesn’t go home and kick his dog, yell at his kids and beat up on his wife.  You don’t want that on your conscience, do ya? We should be aware of the poor bastard’s suffering, and we should be sympathetic and compassionate before the final kill shot crushes his belief in man’s (and woman’s) righteousness.

     In order to save the world from moral turpitude – in other words, to save the human race and prevent its descent into total moral bankruptcy – we have to inhibit our own inhumane impulses and provide the poor pudding head on the other side of the ping pong table, whom your dismembering with your loop kill smashes, with a frickin’ mercy point … which is a run on sentence but I don’t care, because it’s the right thing to do.  Period.
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     “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”  That’s from the Bible somewhere.   Lao Du