The St. Louis Rams did just about everything right yesterday during the game, as the tire tracks on the backs of the Oakland Raiders can tell you following a 52-0 Rams victory. Before the game was another matter, though, as Rams players Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens and Kenny Britt took the field during pre-game introductions in the so-called "hands up, don't shoot" pose you see in the image above.
This, we're told, is the gesture being used on the streets of Ferguson to symbolize the total innocence of Michael Brown and the brutality of Darren Wilson in the shooting whose aftermath has set Ferguson ablaze.
It's a pretty good indication of why professional athletes should stick to the game on the field and not presume to make grand public statements about matters they don't really understand. It's gutless and mindless to offer an empty gesture in "solidarity" with people who are burning down an entire community in response to an event they don't even understand. The media narrative here - that a racist white cop shot an innocent, unarmed black youth - is so far removed from what the evidence suggests actually happened, there's no way to even begin to bridge the distance between the two.
And crap like this only exacerbates the problem. A lot of the violence in Ferguson is sheer opportunism, as some people just like to engage in random violence and the atmosphere there gives them the opportunity to do it. But to the extent any of this is fed by a real belief that racist police brutality occurred here, public figures like these morons fuel the fire with such ignorant gestures.
Now that doesn't mean the NFL should discipline them as St. Louis County Police are asking. I believe people should have the freedom to express themselves however they want without sanction, but their expressions should also be held up for scrutiny in the public arena. The Rams players who participated in this display are ignorant fools who don't understand anything about what really happened when Michael Brown attacked Darren Wilson, and Wilson was forced to make a split-second decision about how to defend his own life. They've not only bought the media narrative, they've now advanced it by telling the world that they stand with the thugs.
People went absolutely bananas because Ray Rice hit his wife and because Adrian Peterson struck his son, and I'm not saying they were wrong to do so. But in Ferguson, violent mobs have destroyed much of the city based on a complete media lie, and Bailey, Austin, Cook, Givens and Britt have now congratulated them for it.
Thugs. All of them.
