Yesterday, I went over with some friends to watch a pro football game. This is, apparently, a year where we are watching, as opposed to a boycott year, those being for when the NFL is even more egregiously stupid than normal.
This game was the New England Patriots against the Detroit Lions, and was held in the Patriots’ home stadium, whatever it is called. The Patriots won, but that’s not exactly the issue and the actual football played has nothing to do with today’s topic.
The topic is actually the field itself, more specifically the end zones. Even more specifically, it involves what was written in the end zones.
As we know, the NFL has gone all woke-happy the past few years, presumably to keep any of the players from running off and starting a competing league and cutting off the NFL’s gravy train. That, of course, presupposes that the players are that woke or, even, that they care more than the average person about things other than football.
So, apart from donating millions of public-relations dollars to unvetted black charities whose names sound good until you do a smattering of research, the NFL is also apparently into feel-good strategies that accomplish nothing but are good for appropriate virtue signaling.
As part of this, the Patriots (as, apparently, have most teams) have painted a slogan into each end zone. In one end zone was the message “It takes all of us.”
Now if that isn’t a mush-mouthed, unproductive, ill-defined statement, I don’t know what is. Let’s start with the fact that I’ve presumably gone to watch a football game. So by default, “It takes all of us” should be inferred by me to mean something like “It takes offense, defense, special teams, coaching and water boys [to win]”, right?
Of course, you and I know it has nothing to do with football, if only because the other end zone has a message that clearly has nothing to do with football. That one reads “End racism.”
I’m serious. In the end zone of a field where 80,000 people are gathered to watch a professional football game, the Patriots and the NFL have determined that it makes sense to adorn the end zone with the phrase “End racism.”
OK, so let’s look past the virtue signaling. What is the actual intent of putting the message in the end zone? OK, stop me if you’ve heard this, but it is 100% virtue signaling. No, we can’t look past it.
How do we know? Well, imagine a scenario where you have just watched the game and, upon walking out of the stadium, you happen to run into the Commissioner of the NFL, who tells you that you are the lucky selected fan who can ask him anything you want and he has to answer.
So you say, “Mr. Commissioner, I just spent three hours of my life watching a football game in a field that had the phrase “End Racism” spelled out in one end zone.”
“Question #1 — Of the 80,000 people in the stadium, and the couple million watching the game on TV, how many do you think are honest-to-God racists?
“Question #2 — Of the X number of honest-to-God racists you claim saw the message on site or on TV, how many of them do you feel would rethink their horrible, awful racism based on a slogan in an NFL end zone?
“Question #3 — Why is the answer to Question #2 anything but zero, given that even honest-to-God racists aren’t going to change their views based on a slogan in an end zone?
“Question #4 — Can you give a single example, anywhere, of a slogan in an end zone (or anywhere else on the field, or in the stands, or anywhere else) changing a person’s fundamental racial beliefs … or any other beliefs?
“Question #5 — Given that the answer to Question #4 was “No”, then why should we believe that the slogan was nothing other than mindless, woke virtue signaling?
“Question #6 — This is the hardest one, Mr. Commissioner. How will you know when racism is actually “ended”? Because otherwise, not only will you have that slogan forever, but people will start asking why it’s still there, since it obviously doesn’t work!”
I don’t care how glib the Commissioner is, there are no “good” answers to those because they are all good questions, the kind we refer to as coming from “critical thinking.” Critical thinking, as we know, is anathema to the left, forcing them to defend positions that are based on rigid obedience to orthodoxy.
The poor Commissioner would be forced to take a heavy bite of his chili dog and answer them all with “Mmglrmfb.”
Think about it. The stadium is in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Of course, Massachusetts is about as leftist a state as it gets, right? So theoretically, there shouldn’t be any racists there, right? Because we know that the only racists are on the other side, since the press tells us that, and they’re totally unbiased.
For the rest of us? Try to imagine an actual racist — you have to squint a little, since there are far fewer than they’d like you to believe — seeing the slogan on the field and reacting like “Oh, my God, the NFL wants to end racism. I guess I’d better stop being a racist then.”
No? Doesn’t sound real? There’s a reason — people don’t change their views because of slogans painted on football fields. You know that, I know that, and certainly the NFL knows that. But there it is, painted on the field for all to see. Our professional sports are run by morons.
And next week, the same morons will have the same virtue-signaling slogan painted in the same end zones of the same stadiums. Worse, there will be the same number of evil racists out there that they were the previous week.
And it will still be far fewer than the NFL thinks.
Copyright 2014-2022 by Robert Sutton
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