Bad news, everybody. Next week’s NFL players-owners meeting about the employees’ right to protest social injustice will not be presented on the NFL Network, or anywhere else for that matter.
But it should be. Desperately so. It will help explain, with a backdrop of brightly colored logos that seem to mesmerize people so, just how deep the American cultural divide really is, and because it be attached to football, there is a slightly better chance that the younger demographic the NFL seems to be losing might take an actual interest.
As thoughtfully explained by ESPN’s Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham, the NFL’s 32 billionaires are torn over the same issues-versus-optics argument that the rest of the country is. Hardliners like Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder want the players to be forcibly knuckled under because the league’s bottom line is endangered, while moderates like Jed York and Jeff Lurie want to be more responsive to the players’ larger needs, understanding that the anthem isn’t the issue here.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Bay Area and California sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
It is 21st century America in a nutshell – failing to agree on definitions of words and actions as the opening act in a fight over who gets to tell what to whom.
And the reason this needs airing is so America can see what it is becoming, how the window toward finding common ground is closing if not already latched, and the level of the damage that awaits us all if we do not get to a place where the simple act of listening is no longer considered a sign of cowardice. And there is no guarantee that this meeting won’t blow up on that very issue, thus further mirroring the nation. This could turn into another authoritarian disaster that will inspire President Trump to tweets new holes in the S.S. Football and separate the nation’s right wing from the game it has always supported.
But maybe seeing famous people fight about it will also show the audience, which is now irredeemably hooked on absurdities like celebrity and optics, how bad this really is. Maybe Las Vegas could put betting lines on it to bring in the gamblers. It’s a natural for fantasy players.
See? We’ve already ruined it by turning it into another contemptible marketing opportunity. We may no longer be ready for serious open discussion on anything here because we have become too adept at grafting our profit-taking and power-making agendas onto everything.
San Francisco 49ers
But we’re running out of time for mere rational and temperate discourse, so the need to share this meeting with the world at large is acute. If nothing else, this meeting could show us just how close to hell we really are.