One link that arrived in such fashion is from the online site of the journal Sojourners, in which the author, pointing towards the release of the movie Concussion this week, lays out why his family does not participate in the NFL. (Now don't be obtuse, folks..."participate" is the term of choice in this blog for any kind of involvement in the NFL, including as a fan who watches games, buys tickets or merchandise, plays fantasy games, etc.) Unfortunately I could only get a free preview, and haven't wanted to spend the bucks to subscribe (I too often find their environmental writing naive at best), I can't quite read it all. It did, however lead me to other articles in that site, older ones not requiring subscription to read, by one Ernesto Tinajero. The first, in 2009, relates his choice to stop watching football; the second, approximately a year later, reasserting the choice and noting some of the events that had occurred over the year since.
I actually noticed some of my own experience in what Tinajero wrote; on those occasions when a football game would be, say, on a TV in a restaurant where I was eating, I would be more jolted than ever before when some particularly violent collision flashed across the screen, even if I wasn't trying to watch (or trying not to watch). I can't say as I'm quite as surprised by this as he is; nonetheless, it's more of a shock to witness than it ever used to be.
In the meantime, another voice appeared recently, with a much quirkier take on the question than I've even attempted; is it at all possible to avoid football altogether? Not just refrain from watching, but have no contact with it at all?
You can catch Matt Crossman's interview with the NPR program Only A Game, in which he describes his futile efforts to avoid the NFL for six weeks, or read his longform story on SB Nation about not only the effort, but the motivation as well. ("Longform" is a key word, but it's worth the read.)
It's kind of sad that Crossman, who doesn't explicitly name any faith motivations for his experiment, nonetheless gets thwarted at least once because his minister uses a football story in his sermon. Or because somebody in his Bible study group hands him a commemorative McDonald's cup for the forthcoming Super Bowl. When he has to wonder "if Christianity is the official religion of football," yeah, it's relevant here.
Living in Charlotte, he's beseiged by the Carolina Panthers' success. Finally, the experiment collapses, well short of its original goal; getting through the Super Bowl without even knowing who makes it.
There is something disturbing about how difficult it was to avoid what I'm calling participation in football. Admittedly Crossman's definition is even stricter than mine; he at least made an effort to pull back from corporations that sponsor the NFL, and I don't have anything like enough time even to research that subject. But still, how does twenty-two people running around on the grass (or a concrete floor, for all practical purposes) hitting each other become so pervasive and unavoidable, even as it becomes more and more apparent that it destroys a large number of those who play it?
It's impossible for it to get to that point without a great deal of desensitization among us, the folks who inhabit the NFL- or NCAA-saturated world without protest. To see harm or trauma or even death happen, not just once but multiple times, without reacting or raising up in some kind of protest, leads each harm to register less and less with us. We get numb. And when we get numb to actual death as a result of the games we watch, we have entered the realm of moral harm.
We experience moral harm when we become numb to injustice, to politicians and wannabe politicians demonizing Muslims for political gain, stirring up the beginnings of Brownshirts, and we don't raise up a protest.
We experience moral harm when young black boys get gunned down for playing with toy guns while rabidly armed white men actually shoot police officers and end up unharmed, and we don't raise up a protest.
And hell yes, we experience moral harm, harm to our own moral capability, when another current or former player finds himself on the middle of the freeway with no idea where he's going, or ends up on an autopsy table with his brain showing the telltale tau markers of CTE, or a high school player dies on the field or in the ambulance or in the hospital after a game, and we don't raise up a protest.
The harm runs pretty deep these days.
If you look at it right, it almost looks like an altar...
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