In Texas, a man tried to blow up a Confederate statue, because these days statues are apparently the greatest threat to our lives, health and well-being. But not before taking a drink of the substance he intended to use to cause the explosion! He did spit it out, so I guess it didn’t taste good.
In New York, activists are protesting that the NFL is racist for not giving unpatriotic quarterback Colin Kaepernick a job, even though 69 percent of all NFL players are black. That’s a lot of black folk! You don’t suppose maybe teams just think Mr. Kneel For The Anthem is more trouble than he’d be worth, do you?
In Bristol, Connecticut, the geniuses who run ESPN decided to pull one of their play-by-play announcers from a football game involving the University of Virginia, which is in the same state where a riot broke out over the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Why did ESPN do this? Because the announcer’s name is Robert Lee.
When I first heard this I thought it had to be from The Onion. No one could possibly be this stupid. Turns out someone is that stupid. I guess that’s why Newt called ESPN “Extremely Stupid Political Network.”
Meanwhile, a Black Lives Matter activist demands that white people sell their homes to black people for a song, because that would be fair, I guess. I don’t think she’s got a job, but she’s been working hard! She came up with 10 other demands as well. They’re all about as insane as that one.
What is this? Why are so many people acting completely crazy? If we’re not trying to blow up statues, we’re demanding football teams sign players for political reasons, or we’re pulling sports announcers because of their names, or we’re demanding totally insane things of people.
I’ve always agreed with what Abraham Lincoln said about the American people: Give them the information they need and they’ll make the right choice. Was I giving you all too much credit?
I don’t think so, but I do think this: Our current media culture gives way too much attention to people as a reward for acting like fools. Blow up a statue, that’s in the news. Make a big deal out of a sports announcer’s name, that’s in the news. Take a knee during the national anthem, that’s in the news.
Even the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville would ideally have been completely ignored. These are ignorant, horrible people. They have the right to speak but they don’t have the right to have anyone pay attention to what they’re saying. Yet as they marched with their tiki torches, the national media went wall-to-wall with coverage. Then the other side showed up and the violence started. At that point, of course it had to be covered as news. But maybe if we hadn’t given the neo-Nazis such celebrity status in the first place, the violence would never have happened, and we wouldn’t have spent the past two weeks talking about this.
Crazy will flourish when crazy is rewarded, and in our current culture the greatest reward you can get appears to be attention. So act crazy, get attention, feel rewarded, act even crazier.
Maybe there’s a change we can make in there somewhere.
