We’ve reached a point where none of this bullshit is surprising. It’s just exhausting.
Headline: “A mom takes action after her 5-year-old was put in a chokehold at school”
Not that there would have been a long list of acceptable reasons for a school resource officer to do this, but of course the reason in this case wasn’t even close to valid: the boy was “singing too loudly in Spanish class and wouldn’t stop.”
Then there’s ProPublica’s report on the juvenile “justice” system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, which includes children as young as eight years old being arrested and jailed for being onlookers at a fight between other kids.
It’s beyond fucked up, but just more for the pile. And when the wider world is this way, of course it’s not surprising to get news from sports like Jim Kaat making an oblique reference to slavery and then kinda-sorta apologizing for it in the middle of a playoff broadcast. Or the revelation that in a 2011 email, Jon Gruden called NFLPA leader DeMaurice Smith, “Dumborris,” and talked about the size of his lips, a trope as old as racism itself.
The Raiders made a statement that they hope to sweep the Gruden matter under the rug, which they will be able to do as soon as the next hideous piece of news about somebody else drops, presumably before the end of the weekend, because that’s how it goes.
Remember Urban Meyer? Yeah, he’s still the coach of the Jaguars, which, fine. If you were going to hire Meyer in the first place, knowing everything we already knew about him, you’re not going to fire him for some dumb antics at his restaurant getting caught on camera. Maybe you’d fire him for losing any credibility in the locker room as a result of his pathetic attempts to explain it away, but he didn’t have any credibility in the NFL to begin with and neither do the Jaguars.
So the infuriating bullshit all just moves on, day after day, in sports and in the world at large, and sometimes both at the same time, like New York City allowing Kyrie Irving to practice with the Nets in Brooklyn, even though he remains unvaccinated, because the team’s practice court — which is named after a hospital — is regarded as a private office. Irving still can’t play games in the public spaces of New York’s basketball arenas, but now he’ll have… more of a chance to give the Nets a spate of breakthrough coronavirus cases?
Oh well. That’s an unsurprising and infuriating story for another day down the road.
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