the politics of football
these days you stop and get some gas, you’re politicized. modern gas pumps have commercials playing and trying to sell you something. with the exception of the black couple who did karaoke on it once, those are a total waste of time. karaoke was brilliant. flat out made my day in a “social” kind of way. it made me feel good and it made me feel like i made friends by just watching how much fun they were having in an every day situation. wouldn’t you know it, now it appears it was staged. but i still loved it.
it was a much simpler time that yesterday, and it wasn’t all that long ago. staged or not, it was not politics and for that i was grateful.
i don’t recognize the world today. many years ago i said in a renegade article we’ve normalized the extreme and i thought that would mean we’d eventually fall back because we’ve not hit our limits. how little did i understand then how far we had left to push.
and that’s what scares me today about how much further “some people” think we need to push. regardless of the time between events, one side eventually pushes too far and crashes like the last jenga move. invariably we do an extreme 180* because we can never simply fix a problem. we have to fix the shit out of it and pound it like a heathen born from the fires of hell that problem was.
whatever the problem was today.
you see, THAT is the problem. *whatever the problem is today*. we can’t even fix these problems before the ADHD of the self-imposed hostages of their own emotions are mad about TODAY.
set as squirrel free or catch a spoon in the right light they’re off and running onto another emotional jihad, leaving more impressive social carnage in their wake. so we tend to find things that are “escape” from the madness of racism, social injustice, killed african gorillas, and the like. just get me away from the “we don’t give a shit what we’re protesting we’re just protesting everything” crowd.
those escapes to me have been music and sports. the last decade or long have been politics consume both. recently we can’t even have an opinion to support law and order without having to apologize for it in a written and approved statement. seems the concept of supporting our fellow players of any nationality and color can’t be done in conjunction with supporting law and order and all the good that does come from that side too.
when did that become ok? that’s beyond normalizing the extreme. that’s fucked up.
the right we have we ONLY have because as a collective we agree to what they will be and as a culture we enforce the values we all cherish. the core values, not what you do with them.
i need to be able to protect your right to speak, not validate what you say. when we are told what to say and how, we no longer have that fundamental right to speak. our values shift. i stared in disbelief as drew brees and his wife apologized for his statements of support to our police when i needed the leadership against the mad rush to change our values for us marches on. he basically apologized for being white.
we need to be able to talk over our differences, not silence them. look back in time and see which cultures, political parties and the like silenced people, told them how to feel, attacked them if they didn’t agree and go with it, and how did that turn out? seems to me that movement is what they call everyone fighting for that right to free speech i was talking about.
so politics has invaded my “escape” i had in football. it’s dug into the very backbone of our culture and entertainment and is forcing a singular view and making you apologize for any other. but what i don’t understand is that i can fully support righting racism AND supporting our police. those were never mutually exclusive until lately when politically they needed to be.
one side is making the other side choose and if you don’t choose their side, the attacks begin.
please tell me what part of our bill of rights that we as a culture have fought centuries to defend for us all did that come from?
again, our rights our only our rights because the collective says they are and protects them. the right, not what you do with it. you have the right to act the fool but there are consequences for bad decisions. or at least there used to be. today a “bad decision” has simply become disagreeing with the new social order.
and then in june roger goodell comes out and issues an apology for not listening. no offense goodell but keeping politics out of my escape was more important to me than allowing people to have the platform to express political views unchecked. you have the right to feel as you wish but you do not have the right to make me feel like shit for how i feel.
certainly not the right to say you’re correct and i’m not based on the sole common point of us simply disagreeing. by that point alone we’re all wrong when we disagree. now what?
yea, now what?
the world is political now. going out for a beer a political fight over injustice because you either must wear a mask at all times or wait, you can’t go because venues are shut down once again and we drift back to my other escape being highly politicized by all this. honestly you can take football but back the fuck off music.
my hating the times we live in certainly won’t change it. but when the nfl has become the political mouthpiece for a single movement, it is no longer NATIONAL but pretty much dedicated to that singular cause. we either have room in our bill of rights for all of us or our values have shifted so far another group is now telling us what our core values are and what rights we will have on top of them.
i strongly believe we can fix our problems if we get back to our differences being a starting point of understanding, not a fight. but we’re not headed in that direction are we? no one wants to talk anymore, they want to be heard. in doing so we’re simply no longer listening resulting in ID like rage as we erode the base of freedoms that have got us this far.
the politics of football is a very powerful thing. unfortunately it has chosen to use that power for 1 cause, not all of us. most unfortunately is that is now loses the one thing i cherished the most in that it was my escape from what it has eventually become.
RIP NFL.
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