Sunday, November 07, 2010

Is It Immoral To Think There Is Something Seriously Wrong Here? [Anthony McCarthy]

Sunday afternoon and I just went through several blogs where the discussion is all about the football games. If I hadn't read this story this morning I might just let it go. A family has 18-year-old triplet boys, all of whom played football, one still does. One was paralyzed while playing football, he might not walk again, the second one was injured seriously enough playing football that he can't play now, the third one "plays for them".

It was Jared who was by all accounts the toughest football player among the Coppola triplets at St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers. No one knew if he ever would stand again after he was paralyzed from the neck down Sept. 4, 2009, in one of the state’s most devastating football injuries. In the weeks after, his brothers dedicated their lives to him, their mother dabbed him with holy water, and Jared got down to work.

And that was after his brother was seriously injured playing football:

Brandon was the first to fall, fracturing his C-5 neck vertebra in a game in 2008. The injury left Brandon’s spinal cord so compromised that doctors prohibited him from playing contact sports again. He insisted on remaining on the team, though, first as a coach’s assistant, then manager.

Paralysis, spinal damage? It's a game, it isn't something necessary, it's not something that is productive, it's dangerous. But, as this story is told, as two of the three triplets have been seriously injured doing it, it's presented as an example of all that is good and noble. I don't see it, I see something seriously wrong with a culture that would present this as anything other than amoral depravity.

I wasn't going to touch this, though what I've said is pretty much what my reaction to reading it was. For the love of God, these are children who are being sacrificed to the false god of patriarchal machismo. We are a nation of Molochites.