Looking into Each Other's Eyes: Violence, Sport, and Home

I like football. It's not my favorite sport. I much prefer baseball because it is more nuanced in its play, the strategy more evident, the competitive match-ups right out there for all to behold. And, most of all, I like it because you can see the player's eyes.

I never played football, so I don't know what it's like "in the trenches." That's where they say the game is won or lost. It is where men weighing about 300 pounds play smash mouth, pounding each other to the turf, grabbing each other illegally and avoiding a penalty almost every play. It is where vicious, hard-hitting linemen vie against each other, striving to open a hole in the line where the fleet-of-foot back can gracefully dance through and run for daylight. Or it is where those lineman hold off the incoming defenders to give the quarterback time to launch the perfect spiral downfield to the streaking receiver. It can be beautiful or brutal. It can be elegant or awful. And, helmets and masks being what they are, you can rarely see the player's eyes.

We should make no mistake about the current debate over domestic violence and the National
Football League. This is not fundamentally about football and its violent play. It is not about forms of corporal punishment appropriate for disciplining children (although I don't want to hear a single argument defending punishments that leave welts on the backs of four-year old children). It is not about the vastly underreported culture of violence inside the homes of America. It is not about the simmering climate of distrust in our urban centers where teenagers live in fear of those sworn to protect them.

All of these are in the mix, of course, but none of this will be addressed until we look each other in the eyes and start being honest about our violent society.


I realize that even making such a claim will stir defensive reactions. The NRA immediately responded to the domestic violence allegations against football player Ray Rice by affirming his right to possess guns, despite the horrific video of Rice pummeling his fiance in a hotel elevator. The NFL immediately tried to minimize the gravity of the problem by pointing to the hundreds of NFL players who have never beaten their girlfriends to a pulp. And, after all, his now wife still loves him.

Ironically, the ground seemed to shift when Anheuser-Busch, one of football's most prolific sponsors, issued a three sentence statement that chilled the NFL hierarchy, criticizing the league for its handling of "behaviors that so clearly go against our own company culture and moral code." If the risk of public outcry didn't get the League's attention, the risk of revenue loss sure did. However, surveys after this incident had saturated the media revealed extensive public revulsion about the circumstances, but few indicated that it  would affect their plans for football watching come Sunday afternoon.

While I think some kind of well-organized national NFL boycott might have some virtuous effect, it could also leave the impression that football is the issue. It isn't. The issue is our inability to weave the various expressions of violence in our society into a comprehensive understanding of our violent culture. We treat each incident as a separate reality, give lip service to its tragic consequences, and then move on.

I didn't think we'd ever forget Sandy Hook School and its lost children, but all the efforts that seemed so sure to succeed in the blush of that horror, fell to the wayside as the gun lobby explained how badly we needed to protect the right of citizens to own assault rifles that spew 30 blood-splattering bullets with a single pull of a trigger. School shootings are now commonplace, sometimes failing to make the lead story on the news.

And the horrible state of the world contributes to the pall that hovers over our society. The sheer horror of public beheadings of innocent people are so disorienting that people strive for a concomitant response.

I was talking to one guy about all of that and he offered his solution. "We just need to kill them all," he said to me.

"Them being who?" I asked.

"All them people. The one's wearing scarves."

"That could well have included my mother," I pointed out.

Silence.

He didn't really mean what he said. But that's just the problem. He wasn't making a joke; he was expressing the anger searing his soul. And ours.

There's something we have to do before we can really fix the NFL. Something we have to do before we can respond to those school shootings or urban unrest. Something we have to do before we can know the truth about domestic violence. Something we have to do before we can respond appropriately to terrorism and global conflicts.

What we have to do is look into each other's eyes and confess that we have given birth and nurture to a violent society.

And then we have to quit the excuses and examine why it is this way and what we can do about it.