If you follow football at all, you know what happened with Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers, or, more specifically, the new management. The details are a little fuzzy, with a lot of they said/he said. Favre had been frustrated by the lack of good talent on the team; reportedly, he’d even offered to take a pay cut to allow the team to hire some better new people. Finally, Favre said he was going to retire, then changed his mind. The management declared that they had “moved on.” Many fans cried, “Foul!” and claimed the management was just trying to make a name for themselves, which meant getting rid of the previous management’s legacy, i.e. Favre.
The protests came to nothing, and Favre, after sixteen years with the Packers, was traded to the New York Jets. The Jets did ok last year, but let Favre go at the end of the season. Then, horrors of horrors, Favre signed with one of the Packers’ arch-rivals, the Minnesota Vikings.
The coverage dripped with nasty t-shirts (“Benedict Favre the traitor” being one of the milder ones) and distraught Packers’ alumni shaking their heads and saying, “Gee, we thought he was a good guy…”
People. Get over it. Seriously.
It’s football. Not a war. Not a country. Not even politics. Just football.
You fired him; what did you expect? That he’d remain in mourning for you forever? If one of my Naval Academy classmates took a job teaching at West Point, we’d rib him pretty hard. But we would not seriously throw around the accusation of “traitor.” We would not bemoan that we “used to think he was a good guy.” (Ok, most of us wouldn’t; I was reminded by a recent commenter that some people take Navy sports way, way more seriously than I ever would. Which is why the kicker one year was getting e-mails that bordered on death threats from alumni for missing a field goal at the Army-Navy game.)
All this, yet we can’t say anything bad about people who are betraying the Constitution. The people who are selling our grandchildren into debt slavery. The people who laugh and sneer that Republicans love Mao for being a strong dictator, but can’t seem to keep actual vocal Mao admirers out of the staff immediately surrounding the president. No, you must not criticize them, or else you are a racist who just hates Obama! And don’t you dare hold a rally protesting the government’s spending spree with our tax dollars, or the media and Nancy Pelosi will call you other nasty names, too, and claim that you are funded by big corporations… even though the big corporations that gave money to the Democrats seem to be benefitting rather nicely from the “stimulus” spending.
On second thought, maybe the problem is closer than it first appears. Both the “Favre is a traitor” and “Everyone who disagrees with Obama is a racist/redneck/idiot” people are seeking to squash criticism of their own actions (or their side’s actions) by loudly maligning anyone who dares disagree, hoping to shift the argument from the facts to, well, arguing about the argument.
The elections are coming up and, although it’s an “off” year, since it isn’t a presidential election year, the ads and phone banks are out in force. Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for attorney general, has been called a dangerous, right-wing zealot (Why? Because he’s a truly conservative, pro-life, pro-school voucher, homeschooler. Yep, dangerous people, those homeschoolers!). McDonnell, the Republican candidate for govenor has been accused of being anti-working-woman because of a graduate thesis he wrote twenty years ago (in spite of his having a daughter who is an Army officer and the fact that our president’s law school thesis remains shrouded in secrecy).
We need to redirect the argument to what is important.
Not football.
Not name calling of opponents.
The election is tomorrow (ok, technically “today”, now, in the Eastern Time Zone). Get out there and argue about what is important. Our future, our country, where we are headed, and where we should be headed. The rest can wait.
The Political Housewyf 