NFL = Need a F*cking Life
Photo courtesy of Zolotkey on Flickr
If I see one more report on the news about the poor NFL players, who already make millions of dollars, complain about being shafted by the owners, who also make millions of dollars, I may just learn how to throw a football properly so I can chuck one at Roger Goodell’s head.
What’s ironic, at least to me, is that this NFL labor dispute is happening the same time collective bargaining rights have been stripped from state employees and teachers in Wisconsin. Unions, especially teacher’s unions, are being made into social pariahs. Yet, I am supposed to give a damn about over-paid athletes and their greedy money-grubbing owners not being able to achieve labor peace.
What’s even more ironic, is I have yet to hear that the NFL players should be stripped of their bargaining rights. It’s OK for them to make millions of dollars, because enough people in the nation won’t blink an eye at handing over thousands of dollars a season to attend games and buy memorabilia. But ask people to pay 1% more to support education in their local community and you would think we had asked them to donate a kidney in a back alley. Because, God forbid, we mess with their weekly excuse to drink copious amounts of beer while watching our modern version of the Roman Colosseum.
I’m not anti-football. My family grew up loving the Buffalo Bills, so you don’t need to preach to me about the passion everyday people can have for a sports team, and how it can benefit local pride.
I am pro-education. And to attack teachers for wanting a decent salary, while not even blinking an eye as these athlete/entertainers demand more money per year than the average person makes in 20-30 years speaks to how really messed up our values have become in this country.
The average cost of an NFL game ticket for this past season was $76.47 (ProFootballWeekly.com). There are 16 regular season games. That’s $1223.52 for a single seat, for a single season, not including any pre-season or playoff games. And people will pay that at the drop of a hat to watch grown men beat the snot out of each other for 60 minutes a week.
Ask the same household to spend that on education for an entire school year, of minimum 180 days, with a minimum of 180 minutes of instruction PER DAY, and the uproar begins. How dare the schools bleed us dry? Their only job is to educate our children and they can’t even do that…right?
Education in this country is never going to improve until we value it more than we do our entertainment. It will never improve until we stop blaming teachers as the reason there’s not enough money to educate our children. It will definitely never improve when some parents make it clear they are willing to spend ridiculous gobs of money on a hard plastic stadium seat, but vocally decry schools for needing money to buy books and pay good teachers.
Let the NFL have it’s lockout. The world will keep spinning. Even more, life in the United States will not begin to crumble.
Keep attacking the teachers and pulling money away from education, and society will crumble. In fact, it already has. The barbarians are at the gate, but they joke’s on us…we are the barbarians, and we are breaking down the walls of our country.
P.S. I wrote this before the tragedy in Japan. Now, more than ever, I hope people begin to gain perspective on how ridiculous it is that we are allowing ourselves to give a rat’s ass about a bunch of whiny megalomaniacs (on both sides) wanting a bigger piece of the pie.
Rachel Baron Writes 