The Opiate of the Masses

There's some sort of football game on today. People will be praying “Don't let the other team score, but let 'my' team score.” For some people it's what little praying they actually do. Unless they are pulled over by a police officer and then the prayer is different. “Don't let them give me a ticket” or “Don't let them kill me.” You can guess the race of each of those prayers. But I digress from my original point.

It is stated that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Today it would be sports. In the olden days people would pray to God. Today, they watch sports games. They live them out with jerseys, fantasy sports leagues, figurines, everything the ancients would do only modernized.

And heaven forbid (or Goodell forbid) that their team move from their city to another one. Or they lose a crucial game. Or anything that involves their team.

Never mind that no city has ever made money hosting the Superbowl. I have read several articles on that. I will find them and post the links. Same thing with the Olympics. No country has ever earned a profit on the Olympics. Yet countries fight for the ability to host that fiasco. And go into great debt to do it, Look at Greece. How much of their crisis has its roots in the Olympics?

And let's look at what the athletes go through. Watch Concussion and realize the story is bigger than that. Look at the injuries faced by baseball, basketball, hockey, and other professional sports players. (I won't go into the damage that professional wrestlers go through. A student lectured me on that. Yes, it's rigged. Yes – those injuries are real. No, they don't make a ton of money.)

Then again, go down to the collegiate level and look at the injuries and washout from that.

Then step down to the high school level and realize that doctors are seeing injuries at that level that used to be seen only in professional athletes.

All for what?

And for all the money they do make, it's nothing compared to what the owners make. At our expense. Who pays for the stadiums and the upkeep? Not the owners. We, the taxpayers, do. And we have no share in what the team does. Footing the bill for the stadium is the price we pay for having the team in our town. (Unless you are Green Bay, but the league passed a law that prohibits that from ever happening again.)

For what? Not enough.

And I remember the four Super-bowls in Buffalo. I was happy when they didn't make it to the fifth. It allowed the people to decompress and refocus on their lives and see that no matter how well the Bills (Sabres, Bisons, or Bandits) did, their lives were not going to change. And Western NY was not going to get very much from what they sank so much money into.

What benefits a community gets from having a team wing flow up to the 1%. We, the 99%, get left out. And yet we have to foot the bill for the stadiums and sports arenas at the expense of our schools, roads, hospitals, libraries, and other public services.

So, for me, I don't care what team wins. It doesn't matter.

We have all paid too much to this idol, god, whatever you want to call it that can't save us.

Let's stop sacrificing ourselves to it.