You know, all these people who be like "letting your kid play football in high school is a form of child abuse" or "football is American culture at its worst, one giant, violent phallic symbol" just don't get it. Look
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Say you tear that down. So you send the boys of fall home. Say you crush the ritual tempo of small town life. Say you cut apart the ritual traditions that sons believe connect them to their fathers and grandfathers.
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Say you destroy one of the few institutions where young men meet responsible and caring old men. Say you take away one of the few chances that boys who aren't bookish and never will be to thrive in a world that forces that sort of person down to the gutter.
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Say you do all that. Say you strip away this source of meaning. What are you going to replace it with?
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I can imagine some tribe in the Amazon who has a ritual vitally important to it. Maybe it is one of those "rites of passage" rituals. Perhaps the rite asks young men to jump off a cliff or put their hands into the nests of stinging ants.
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The rite might would be something dangerous. Something coded masculine. And then globalization happens and the world crushes in and the forces of 'capitalism' and 'consumerism' and 'imperialism' flatten our tribe's culture. Rituals like this start to disappear...
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And in that moment we would see op-eds and twitter threads lamenting the flattening of culture and the destruction of indigenous modes of meaning. The literati would sympathize with them.
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You need to ask yourself: why can I judge so lightly those from lands far away, but judge so harshly those who less than an hour's drive away?
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There is no compassion in the calls to destroy the American football game. That's all I ask of you. Even if you still think this game must be eliminated for the greater good--recognize what it is you are demanding. Have compassion for the people whose lifeway you seek to destroy.
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And now a blog post that expands on some of these themes. If you liked this thread, please read it: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/02/on-american-football-game.html …
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End of conversation
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If you seriously think that's the type of man these students meet, you are delusional. I've lived in small town America for 3 decades. I'd do everything in my power to keep children away from many of the men most heavily involved in youth spirts.
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