Dear Friends,
Full disclosure: I am writing this before I know the outcome of the Suns game last night. I won’t have time this morning to do a ‘live’ blog, so you are getting the canned version today. Right now, it is 6:41pm on Tuesday night and I am excited to see which version of my team comes out tonight.
There was so much optimism on the local radio shows Tuesday morning and afternoon. I guess they sort of have to be optimistic or people will tune out. Do sports fans really have such thin skin?
Of course, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
It’s pretty obvious that we have turned the type of corner in our society that will be hard for my generation and the ones that preceded us to fix. Sports is just one way to see how ridiculous things have become. You’ve got athletes, and good for them that they can get it, but athletes getting paid thirty plus million a year to play a game who act like they have been wronged if the referee calls them for an obvious foul.
The haves don’t play by the same rules as the have-nots, which is not news to me or anyone reading this, but it is so hard for the average fan to relate to the players as people. I certainly struggle with it. I’d love to think that if the occasion occurred and I were to have a conversation with one of my beloved Suns that they would be cool and down to earth and just be able to shoot the shit, even for a few minutes.
I don’t know for sure where I am going with this… I’m rambling. A rambling guy, as Steve Martin would say, a rambling man.
Yesterday, I was telling my students that I was counting on them to make the world a better place. We all just want to be respected and I think we can get there as a society, but it can’t be through passive acts of self-imposed boredom or malaise. It must be through action. They will need to be assertive and let the powers that be know that they won’t support their bullshit financially or through social media.
This means, again, critical thinking will be necessary.
That’s my soapbox right now. My students have checked out and gone slightly braindead. I may be slightly braindead, too, to be honest. They don’t want to think or solve problems or, in many cases, show even a modicum of interest in learning something new. What they don’t realize is that they are really behind and we don’t have time to just coast our way through the last few weeks of the year.
We can, maybe, coast for the last couple of days.
The game’s about to start. Maybe I’ll comment on it before I pass out.
See you tomorrow.
Love this guy.
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