Let’s test your powers of clairvoyance! See if you can complete this chain of events.
!) Philadelphia Eagles win berth in Super Bowl.
2) Eagles win game.
3} ???
If you answered “3) Fans riot,” you saw the future! Oh, I know–fans always riot. Any dummy could’ve guessed it. Only one death, though: a teenager was killed when he climbed up a street pole and fell off. And only 30-odd arrests.
But you see how important “Sports” is to us. The whole country shuts down for Super Bowl. I wonder what would happen if we had five or six of them.
(Watch what you say, boyo!)
The current head of the Democrat Party is urging the resistance to take to the streets – but without a George Floyd it’s not happening.
Careful! They could manufacture a new George Floyd in a New York minute.
I remember hearing about soccer riots, decades ago, and thinking them absolutely senseless. Now we have the same sort of thing here. I’m all for sports, but the score really has little meaning. Sure, a star player on the winning team might get a lucrative endorsement contract, but in reality, the consequences of winning or losing a game are fairly limited.
It seems that there are people who are looking for any excuse to cut loose and cast off all restraint. What better excuse for getting smashed than your team winning, or losing, a big game? And, if you are already drunk as a skunk, the number of inadvisable things you can do at that time is all but unlimited. A young man of my acquaintance went to a concert, took drugs and leapt off a retaining wall to show off. He ended up losing a leg, but hey, he was high when it happened.
So Philly won the Superbowl and a teen died. I wonder if the teen’s family feels that this was an equitable exchange. Yes, the teen showed exceptionally poor judgment, but I doubt that climbing that pole would have happened had there not been a postgame riot. Was alcohol involved? It’s illegal to provide alcohol to a minor, but some people feel that all the rules are suspended after a big game, so who’s keeping track of something so trivial as the law? 🙂
When I was a child, I saw some of the adults in my world as a bit stuffy. In retrospect, what I thought of as stuffy was mostly simple dignity, something greatly lacking in today’s world. There was a time, not that long ago, when most adults maintained their dignity and avoided acting in an immature fashion. That seems to have been cast off in our day, and especially so when sports are involved.
I don’t think there are very many people left who know what “dignity” means.
It seems to be a bit scarce these days.