Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player — too good, it turns out.

The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho's team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho's coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.

But Vidro says he didn't quit and the team refuses to disband.

In this life, you either rise above by creating something new -- an ability, a work of art, a machine, a civilization -- or you find yourself in the bad position of trying to push others down so you feel like you're rising.

But in this universe where relativity reigns, you only feel the motion of rising, because you're still relative to the rest of your environment, which is being pushed backward by time. You rose relative to where you were, but that sank as time passed. So you achieve nothing.

In this case, a star pitcher is too good, so the others -- who want their kids to shine at something -- act to de-legitimize his participation instead of accepting his greatness. It's like a fly elated at the corpse of a spider, glad for the petty revenge it can take against its erstwhile master.

More than any political reality, this demographic and psychological reality commands human beings. We fight for status. The smart do it by getting good at something, even if it's not Little League, and the fearful do it by destroying the best hopes of their generation.

Compare it to this short story, Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
...
Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
...
“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

We either rise to excellence, or we reduce others. Equality is a naive notion, indeed; so is the idea that we can have a life of peace without struggle, because even if we don't struggle against each other, we are struggling against time and our own limitations, hoping to exceed them.

When we push others down, we feel like we're rising, but if the camera pans out and we see the whole scene, we realize that we got nowhere, and we damaged a hope for all of us collectively through the greatness of another.

In this life, we either take our own perspective as absolute and so become prone to wanting to tear down others, or we accept that we are each but a small part of this world, and we must work and take risks to get anything in it. Nothing is owed to us. We are unequal by birth, unequal in aptitude, and there are no guarantees of fairness regarding the results, but unlike individuals, the world around us never becomes neurotic and delusional. It is consistent, and so gives us the basis by which we can struggle for excellence.

If we do not, we relapse inward and become addicted to changing appearance not reality:

“It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that,” said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole.

“What we’re doing,” Mr. Johnson said, “is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking.”

Editing a photograph seems like a simple act, but as we get accustomed to being able to do it, our tendency is to try to alter the way reality appears to us so that we feel better about ourselves, instead of going out there and making change so that reality is better to us.

It even has political implications, as our friends Kraftwerk remind us:

Interpol and KGB
Control the data
Memory