Every morning, well, most mornings, I get up and make a French press pot of coffee. While I wait for the water to boil, I heat up a cup from yesterday's pot, let the dog out, and listen to the news while going about the business of wandering around, waking up. I have an Alexa, and while I do this it plays a series of little news snippets from the NY Times; NPR; Fox News, and so on. I think they're trying to be fair and cover all bases by having all these different types of news shows. Today, Fox was really trying to get me excited about the NBA playoffs. And I realized how much I don't really care about them right now. And I started thinking about what has changed for me during this pandemic. What I care about. What excites me. What feels important. And it ain't sports, much as it feels like the powers that be would like them to be. I don't connect normal with professional sports. Or rather, normal as in healthy occupations that I am happy to do for the short span of this life. I think the virus has increased my need and ability to critically think. To parse what people are trying to sell me. Don't get me wrong. I love watching sporting events. Especially baseball. But I find the way most people on TV and radio talk about it is out of touch with reality. There is this strange lionization of sports, like this is what gives our lives meaning, as opposed to it is something we enjoy passing the time with while living our lives.
Usually, this over exaggeration of the importance of professional sports doesn't bug me. But this morning it did. The only think I find really pertinent about sports these days is how there was a walk out during the recent protests, and that walk out resulted in a lot of arenas being turned into voting centers. That is cool. That actually does have meaning.
We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Over a thousand Americans died yesterday. Ten people for every yard on a football field. Imagine them. A thousand people, standing in a line on a football field, from field goal to field goal.
Now imagine them laying there, dead.
What I'm trying to say is, I'm tired of people telling me via advertisements and sponsored newscasts what they think I should consider important. Because I don't think they care so much about what is right as they do about making money.
And money, as Ringo, John, Paul, and George taught us many years ago, can't buy me love. Or more time on this earth. Or joy.
I would love to go to a ball game.
I would love more for less people to die every day.
For more people to take this thing seriously.
For our better angels to finally make an appearance.
Okay. Here's a song. It's the foreshadowed Can't Buy Me Love by The Beatles.
1 comment:
I've been feeling somewhat the same way recently. ABC recently replayed a great game with the Rams going against the Kansas City (racist label) Chiefs at L.A. Coliseum. When I saw it live in 2018 I thought it was one of the greatest football games I had ever seen, though I'm not always the greatest fan of football. Many real fans agreed. I recorded it this time so I could watch and get that same thrill. After the first quarter, the thrill wasn't happening for me. There are too many other things going on. As you pointed out, you could line up a hundred people on each ten-yard line on a football field to represent the one-thousand Americans who die each day from the coronavirus. Or think of it as more than forty-five football teams a day. It's hard to watch football while seeing the numbers that way.
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