It’s that glorious time of the year when all four major sports leagues are playing. With the NFL just 30% of the way into its’ season, both the NBA and NHL just getting started, and Major League Baseball about to crown a champion, it seems an appropriate time to point out that your team sucks.
Not your sports team, your other team, if you have one, and it’s getting harder and harder to find people that don’t.
As I was discussing last week, I love sports but hate most sports fans. The idea that people literally equate their identity to the success and failure of a group of humans they’ve never met and wouldn’t know you from Adam is so infantile and brazenly pathetic it should be studied much deeper at institutions across the country. Sports should merely be seen as a form of entertainment similar to movies and shows. Sure, if they suck, we walk away annoyed or disappointed, but sane people let it go quickly. Letting the outcome of a game determine your mood for the next many days, if not weeks, is clearly demented, not to mention the behavior of a child. There is supposed to come a time in your human development when you learn that pouting is neither an option nor a solution.
This brings us to your other team and the even bigger problem. That team’s season never ends, which is why people never have a chance to just step away from blindly supporting whatever their team is up to. This team, also, is a group of humans that you’ve never met and wouldn’t know you. Worse, they don’t even care about you. At least most professional athletes appreciate the fans en masse. They understand that you’re rooting for them, buying merchandise with their names on it, and in many cases, feeding them energy with loud, in-person support. Your other team literally doesn’t care that you even exist other than to use you. Your wants, needs, and desires are of absolutely no concern to them at all whatsoever. This team even goes so far as to make you promises that they have no intention of keeping. They lie to you constantly, hide everything they can from you, and steal from you. Yes, they steal from you, and yet, you continue to not only support them, but you also loudly scream on their behalf, sometimes violently, and depending on just how invested you are, you even give them your money (the money they haven’t already stolen from you).
I’m talking, of course, about your political team. It sucks. Whether it’s team R or team D, your team is all of the things I just described. Oh, and a quick aside; those of you who try to be cute and separate yourself from political parties by saying instead that you’re either conservative or progressive, you too, are all of the things described and one other big one which says more about you than it does about them; you’re all enormous hypocrites.
This is a problem because too many people (more today than ever before in my lifetime) scream that their team is the solution, and the opposing team is the problem. And yet, both of these political movements abandon what are supposed to be their core principles at the drop of a hat as long as the outcome suits them. That is what we call being unethical, and yet people look the other way when their team does it, which they do constantly, and that, in turn, makes them unethical as well. And they don’t seem to care, as long as their side wins. Now we’ve gone from unethical to unscrupulous. Sociopathic and psychotic are the only two steps left on the ladder down to complete and total cretin.
For example, last week a 16-year-old girl knowingly violated the rules of her high school, repeatedly and intentionally. This form of blatant flouting of the rules, and questioning of authority is the type of behavior consistently condemned by team R. After all, they’re the law-and-order party. And yet, this girl became the conservative hero of the week. You see, just like with Kyle Rittenhouse, law and order only apply now to team R, when it’s being used to uphold something that they agree with. So, Grace Smith was hailed as brave and strong for intentionally getting suspended for not wearing a mask to school. Since team R is against mask mandates, the ends justify the means, which is the thought process of a true intellectual coward. As an aside, it was also misreported endlessly that she was arrested for not wearing a mask. She was arrested, but for trespassing, after she was told to leave school grounds after being suspended and refusing to do so. But the truth isn’t important when we’re trying to win.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/wyoming-girl-suspended-arrested-trespassing-mask-mandate
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante
Speaking of such policies, team D has, for decades, preached the slogan “my body, my choice.” It applies most notably to their support of legalized abortion, but also to the issue of consent, gender identification, and something called “body integrity.” But as far as team D is concerned, it is no longer your body, your choice when it comes to wearing masks or injecting medicine into you.
Leaping back to team R for a moment, the team that preaches law and order, much more extreme examples of their hypocrisy than the hero anti-mask girl would be the insurrectionists of January 6th and all of the various right-wing nationalists constantly threatening or engaging in activities that have to be stopped by who else but law enforcement? It’s the same thing with the 2nd amendment and/or we’re-going-to-civil war Nazis who without thinking, talk about getting in gun battles with cops that come to their doors…not very law and order friendly.
Progressives/liberals/Democrats continue, to this day, to preach that Covid isn’t gone, wear your mask, kids in schools all wear masks, get tested, isolate, be safe…and yet 2 million illegal migrants have streamed into this country since President grandpa took office, and less than 10% of them were even tested for Covid, let alone only 33% of them accepting vaccination. https://www.foxnews.com/category/us/immigration
Back to my conservative friends on team R, the party of small/less government and letting local people, like your elected school board, make local decisions…unless, of course, you don’t like the decisions they’re making and then you pass laws and executive orders in your state banning local leaders from instituting things like mask mandates. They’re also the party of small businesses and the freedom of business owners to make their own decisions. They championed the Colorado baker who didn’t want to make a cake for a gay couple because it’s his right, not just religiously, but as the owner of the business! But if you own a business in many conservative states and want to require your employees or customers to be vaccinated, suddenly that’s not your right any longer.
Team D is the party of woke-ism. They stand up for any and every minority there is unless they find out someone in that minority is on team R, and then that particular minority person is no longer a protected class, they’re a traitor for having their own individual thoughts.
The examples are endless, which is why it’s all so disconcerting to say the least. We have lost more than just our moral compass, we’ve lost more than just our souls, we’ve lost ourselves, entirely. Rather than using fundamental, core principles to guide and help us decide, we merely identify the outcome we want and then say that any means necessary will do. Worse, in many cases, many people don’t even bother to think about the outcome, they just ask “what does my team want, I’m in favor of that!”
All of this amidst the backdrop of being a sports fan. When some rabid fan is all jazzed the day after his team wins, to the point where he won’t shut up about it (and I’m talking about “that guy,” not people who just have a spring in their step for a day, but the guy who is acting like he just won the lottery, his wife gave birth, and he’s in remission from cancer all in the same day), my favorite approach is to ask the moron how, exactly, his life has improved as a result of the outcome of this particular game? Does he have more money? Has his health vastly improved? Are all his problems gone? Do his wife and kids hate him any less?
Oh sure, you can argue that happiness and a celebratory mood are good for the soul, and I’ll grant you that, but I won’t grant you that this is equitable happiness. Over-the-top joy and adulation over an accomplishment you had quite literally absolutely nothing to do with is beyond vapid; it shows how empty your life really is.
With your political teams, it is almost simultaneously contradictory, which makes it more maddening to watch you all engage in this sort of fandom. On one hand, allowing politicians to have anything to do with your ability to live a happy and/or successful life is the approach of losers. When team R members scream and yell about all of the taxes and restrictions put on their ability to start and run businesses, that’s just pathetic if it actually paralyzes you. You don’t have to like it but adapt and overcome. I have no respect for people who leave states they literally love in every other way because of politics. Stay and fight, you coward. Fight to find a way to excel despite the difficult conditions placed before you.
Conversely, it is absolutely true that if one of these teams wins too many times in a row, in too many of their most extreme ways, it will have an effect on almost all of us, and in almost universally negative ways. The Climate Change extremists are teetering on major victories that will dismantle America’s ability to be the globe’s superpower, and are already having devastating effects on our current economy. We are inches away from a goal line stand that, if it fails, could outlaw abortion in America; a decision that will not end abortions in any way, it will merely end in many more deaths of not just babies, but their mothers. Post Roe v Wade America will look like Prohibition America, but a lot more bloody. Behavior controlists have won a major victory with the vaccine mandates and have been given a new template on how to use the “greater good,” argument to get what they want. If they’re allowed to continue, they will soon argue that, in order to keep hospitals from overflowing, we all have to do our part, all of the time. That means more than wearing masks, it means eating certain things and banning others to combat obesity and cancer. It means mandating exercise and banning certain kinds of speech.
Neither movement is right all of the time. In fact, based on history, they’re both wrong half of the time, which is the ultimate irony. Your team needs their team. America needs both teams in order to win. When the two teams are focused on their agendas, and not on destroying one another, they check each other from going too far. For now, that ship has sailed, and even if it wanted to turn around and come back, it would simply sit offshore in Long Beach for months on end, rotting like our food and furniture currently is.
No, by the way, I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that we would start to move towards it if more Americans would step away from the table of madness, take off their R or D jerseys and instead, put on their “USA,” sweaters. Your teams suck, and they’re making America suck…and you…you are not “saving America,” you all are ruining America and you all suck.
