I think "escape" is convenient shorthand for many of us to describe our attachment to the game. I can sit for three hours, watch a Cowboys football game, feel a broad range of emotions -- excitement, joy, anger, pathos, etc. -- and at the end of the game, my life hasn't changed. My mortgage hasn't grown. Job circumstances haven't changed. "Real life" hasn't been materially affected.
Football is, or at least was, a trip to the amusement park. It is, or was, an emotional diversion, which is healthy. Emotional release is healthy for human beings, and football is/was an opportunity to relieve real stress.
In my view, this is why so many of us are truly angry about present circumstances. Our political views are peripheral. Our stances regarding labor issues are peripheral. Our feelings about officiating and rules interpretation are peripheral. Perhaps it would be better to describe those and the other negative feelings about the NFL as derivative. We love the game, and the game is being distorted and pushed to the background.
Some of this is surely unalterable. The impact of concussions on player health is a "real life" problem over which the league has limited control, for instance. Twenty-four hour news saturation that thrives on the foibles of celebrities, politicians and athletes won't be erased regardless of who is commissioner. Social media has opened windows that won't be closed.
But the league can do one thing -- it can stop contributing to the larger problem. This is one area in which Roger Javert Goodell has been an utter failure. He has chosen to take sides in social wars; not personally, which is his right, but under the guise of the ridiculous Shield, which is in and of itself symbolic to me of the corruption and hubris of the NFL.
Goodell has foisted upon many fans a "new" product that has changed both the game and the experience of the game, which for many of us, and for myriad reasons, we do not like. He has turned the amusement park into a social debate forum, and we do not care to visit. Most of us are intelligent and aware enough to appreciate the need for such debate, but we all want to go to an amusement park now and then.
Beyond that, the hapless commissioner, has allowed his monumental ego and moral certitude to impact the game experience in ways we do not enjoy. All of the while, he has proven himself to be close-minded and unwilling to accept criticism or correction. And he has done all of this while brandishing power that while apparently legally defensible, to this point, is in no way morally defensible. He is a man in a bubble filled with his own brand of liquid elitism and hypocrisy. He thrives by drinking of it. He breathes power and disgorges a gas poison to a game which has provided so many of us lasting memories and constant entertainment.
The commissioner has thrived on his relationships with and ability to manipulate a sports media that will, in its collective mind, speak truth to power -- unless the power is held by sources and contacts that can have a positive impact on the careers of media members. The NFL can and does contribute through its own powerful media arm, and independent reporters have bizarrely embraced the league's propagandists as if they were legitimate members of independent organizations. Most in the NFL media -- not all - are sell-outs who would rather ridicule antagonists such as Jerry Jones than offend the power of a corrupt and broken Shield.
Most in the media would rather see a young man such as Ezekiel Elliott tried and convicted on vaporous "evidence" than challenge the league that feeds their pocketbooks. Many will fall back on their own moral superiority and on a window-dressed panel of so-called league "experts" to nod their near-vacant heads and say "well, clearly Elliott deserved what he received" because, well, because he does... and to Dante's Inferno with our own rule of law and the fundamental fairness which it demands. They would rather, in the end, fall back on legalistic defenses -- "Well the collective bargaining agreement..." than to argue basic right or wrong. They choose to ignore the naked emperor because it is convenient to do so.
Many of the owners would rather count their booty than to stop for a moment and ask themselves -- "Hang on there, why did a judge compare the search for fairness in this case to the elusive hunt for the proverbial needle in a haystack?" And the commissioner himself, rather than displaying the moral courage and self-awareness to ask himself the same question, doubles down as always merely to prove again his ability to flex muscle and to decide for all what is right.
And so it goes, and so many of us finally say, "Enough. You have taken something we loved and molded into a nearly beastly thing we can'[t recognize and truly do not embrace. You are asking us to walk through thistles to reach a roller coaster that no longer extends as high or offers as many thrills. And you have done this while arrogantly brandishing the Shield, which you have manipulated into a personal sword for an egomaniac."
And here is what the NFL wants; it wants us to behave as the poet Stephen Crane described --
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
Because it is our heart, they expect us to eat of it, regardless the bitter taste. And if a few raggedy, non-conforming owners raise an objection, they wield again the corrupt and decayed Shield.
