Doctoring age in Dominican: Good medicine.(Chicago Tribune)

CHICAGO _ The easiest thing in the world is to condemn what happened in this year's Little League World Series as either the worst kind of parental sliminess on record or the collapse of civilization as we know it.

But some cultural context, dear reader, is in order. What Danny Almonte's father did is not considered evil in the Dominican Republic. Doctoring a birth certificate sometimes is considered good medicine in a country in which poverty is the norm and life comes with too many sharp edges.

Sometimes it's considered a survival skill.

This is not meant as a blanket pardon but as recognition that people from an impoverished nation often live by different rules than we do.

If your life consisted of eating one meal a day or of using cornhusks for toilet paper, then maybe changing a birth certificate wouldn't be considered a big sin.

If your sister competed for nutrition with intestinal parasites living inside her body, then maybe you'd be willing to take some shortcuts to the daily-recommended allowance of vitamins. You might fudge a little bit on that birth certificate, a few years up or down, depending on your particular needs.

"When they cheat it's for the family," Jose Serra, a Cubs scout in the Dominican Republic, said Saturday. "We don't have as much opportunity as you guys have over there in the United States. They don't do it because they want to do it. They think if they do it, they'll find a better life for them or their family."