Oh, Wisconsin! What happened to you since I left?

No sooner do I write a post about how Americans have forgotten the importance of losing than I see this article about words that are now banned in high school gyms across Wisconsin.

You can apparently no longer shout words like “scoreboard” or “air ball” at the other teams or their fans for fear of hurting their feelings.

Look. Life is tough. You’re going to get punched in proverbial face by friends, family, at school, at work, by strangers and even when your favorite team loses. Not everything goes your way, and you better prepare yourself to deal with it.

But so long as we make rules like this to try and protect our kids from growing up, we’re going to grow ever weaker and less prepared to deal with the things life throws at us.

Every time someone reads something like this, they get a little shocked, they make fun of it, and then they move on. And these kinds of rules compound and spread until the next thing we know, we’re not allowed to say anything to anybody.

Didn’t we all spend our elementary school years being forced to read books that warned us about this? (Thank you, George Orwell.)

I can only hope that the high school basketball fans are going out of their way to make sure the entire list of banned phrases are shouted all the way through every basketball game they can attend.

I just don’t believe resistance if futile.