This Sporting Life

A prominent NPR morning host said something over the weekend that brought me up short. The big topic under discussion on his radio show, as one would expect, was domestic violence in the NFL and how slow the league was to deal with it. Finally, when they got to talking about the weekend schedule, the host, who is something of a sports fan, said he couldn’t watch NFL games anymore. The domestic violence issue was the final straw. Earlier straws for him included the NFL neglect of players after they leave the sport, suffering from often-debilitating injuries acquired during their careers, which have led some to suicide.

Wow, I thought, could I adhere to such a strict moral standard as that radio host?  I have a running joke intro that goes, “I’m not a sports fan, but…” I am surrounded by sports fans in life, and will watch at least part of an NFL contest if there’s some emotional connection, like a home team in the playoffs. Most important for me is that I can at least understand the game and speak the language with those who really do care about it.

I must confess I actually like boxing, often called the “sweet science.” Of course, there is very little about it that’s sweet. The object is to hurt another human being. Clearly, I don’t want to see anyone maimed or killed – I think most of us who are fans are attracted to the boxers who display the skill,  “science” in that phrase, to win. And modern referees are trained to call fights when one competitor is obviously losing and unable to effectively respond to the punishment he is taking. But maiming and even death can still occur.

You could apply this principle to other things, and many of us have. Many drink only fair-trade coffee. They refuse to buy an athletic shoe or a smartphone if they’re told it’s made with child labor. They eat organic, not only for health reasons, but because the farmworkers who picked the crops aren’t exposed to pesticides. Or they stop eating beef because its production uses precious resources and contributes to climate change. They don’t shop at store chains known for underpaying their staff.

So what’s the matter with me? If I consume any of the things above, does my moral compass need to be sent back to the shop for repair?

I have nothing to say that will provide much of a defense, except this: I think most of us make compromises in these areas all the time. If we didn’t, a lot of babies would be going out with a lot of bathwater (which we have to be careful of here in drought-stricken California). In the case of the NFL, the league leadership is responding to public pressure by implementing policies to deal with the domestic violence issue. These pressures do work. If a sport or an industry or a public institution is at least making an effort to clean up its act, is that good enough, or do we have to stop buying tickets to the act altogether?

I think I’m going to have to get back to you on this one.

Choose Your Virus

It’s very interesting where we choose to put boots on the ground. Without what seems to be much hesitation, President Obama has called for sending 3,000 troops to West Africa to build local treatment centers in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus. Even though it seems we are responding quickly, the experts are saying we are only leaping into the firefight when the house has almost burned down – and with the number of those infected doubling every few weeks, the urgency seems warranted. Will Ebola make it to the United States? Probably not, those same experts say, but if the population infected is allowed to explode, that likelihood increases. Without flinching, one expert said this disease had the potential to rival a Black Death that ravaged Italy in the 1300s.

I am probably by no means the first to draw a parallel to the situation in Iraq and Syria, with the spreading virus of ISIS. We have no prickly political issues at the moment keeping boots off of West African ground, it seems, but the weariness created by two less-than-popular wars kept us from involvement in Syria while its unrest morphed into civil war, and we couldn’t seem to get out of Iraq fast enough. Is there something the West could have done to prevent the loss of some 200,000 lives and the displacement of millions? We of course will never know – and what good would it do us at this moment if we did?

Now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, says we may indeed have to put boots on the desert sand again in the form of advisors embedded with local forces taking on ISIS. This road should seem very familiar, as we’ve been on and off it for the past 50 years. In 2003, the reasons for entering Iraq may have been manufactured. But are they this time? It’s unlikely that ISIS would strike the United States in our homeland – perhaps equally as unlikely as Ebola spreading here, for the moment at least. But will that remain the case if we do nothing?

The troops we are sending to West Africa are no less in harm’s way than those who will be heading to Iraq and possibly, Syria. But there simply may be no alternative to getting our boots dirty.

The Foreign and the Domestic

This week a friend sparked a bit of a debate when she expressed criticism of the term “domestic violence.” Violence is violence, she said, and should be recognized as such. The word “domestic,” she argued, tends to minimize the awful things that sometimes happen in families or relationships, as if the violence was protected in some way.

It has often been protected by a tradition of silence, and the notion that family affairs should remain in the family and that they are nobody else’s business. There are religious traditions about wives being subservient to husbands, or social notions about a man’s home being his castle.

Making the headlines this week were the video of Baltimore Ravens running back – or should we say ex-Ravens running back Ray Rice -- beating up his girlfriend in an elevator, and South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius skating clear of a murder charge in the shooting death of his girlfriend. And today, as it happens, is the 20^th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

Personally, I don’t quite understand any man physically abusing a woman, especially in what started out as a love relationship. I just don’t think I was shipped with that software. I tend to swing the other way, more in the direction of worship of women, which has its own set of issues. But does it all make me a good guy, or am I just lucky? Conversely, I don’t understand why some women tolerate an abusive domestic relationship, and even defend a husband or boyfriend when criticism comes from the outside.

My friend is right. There are no special circumstances or settings that make physical abuse OK, and it needs to be punished. But we also have to understand the dynamics of these things on a deeper level. The man who abuses a woman tries to rule by fear, because he is ruled by it himself: the fear of loss of a precious or needed thing. The fear that if absolute control isn’t exercised, a static situation may change – the woman may leave, or simply want to breathe, to have joy in her life that he is not the agent of. Are we allowed to have compassion for a man driven by such feelings or explore where they come from? Compassion in these situations is difficult, because seeking to understand is construed as seeking excuses for awful behavior. There are no excuses for it.

But do we have to at least talk about it? Absolutely. It’s about literacy. We hear often about financial literacy. But there is also relationship literacy. It means being able to discuss things it just isn’t nice or easy to discuss, turning over the rug under which things have been hidden for a long time, challenging the models some of us were raised with or have embedded in us for some other reason.

There is a notion of TMI – sharing unnecessary details about intimate things with others. But I have always had a suspicion that a bigger problem these days is TLI – too LITTLE information, about things we desperately need to talk about.

Ignorance Isn't Bliss

When most of us hear the word “ignorance,” we might think of someone living in a remote cabin in the woods with no electricity, no smart-phone, no Internet (gasp!), maybe an outhouse with a half moon on the door in the backyard.

But ignorance is a lot more than being uninformed. The root of the word is “ignore,” the definition of which is “REFUSE to take notice of,” according to Webster. Heck, you could even be somewhat informed, and still refuse to take notice of something. So it’s not about being stupid, it’s a deliberate choice.

Officially, we have tried to ignore the human tragedy in the Middle East for years. It’s none of our business, we can’t afford it, Bush screwed everything up, let’s get out of there. Fine. But in Syria, almost 200,000 people have been killed and several million displaced. The civil war there isn’t news anymore. It’s a failed state, a vacuum. And it is being filled by ISIS.

Who’s that? The dog on Downton Abbey?  Where were they six months ago? Well,  they are the latest scourge of the Earth. The heads of Messrs. Foley and Sotloff were by no means the first to roll at the hands of ISIS, but all of a sudden, we are paying attention, thanks to some nasty videos. They were OUR heads.

I have heard analysts say, “It’s not about religion, it’s about power.” Really? Power is like money: worthless until used. And what do the goals of ISIS appear to be? The establishment of a great Islamic caliphate, with everyone in it subject to Sharia law. Not the first time in history this has happened, of course. These human impulses aren’t always religiously driven, but when they are, it’s real trouble.

Now it looks like we’re going to have to do something about this, though we have no taste for involvement in it. The symbolism of the President telling us what he plans to do on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary cannot be ignored. The case is going to be made that ISIS really is our business.

But I hope the President will minimize discussion of what we’re NOT going to do. I say, leave everything on the table. That doesn’t mean we have to serve everything on every plate, but we should leave the table set.

We have already learned the hard way that massive military invasions in these cases don’t work very well, but yes, we may have to put small numbers of well-trained boots on the ground (in whatever form those may be) with very specific, targeted missions, along with the usual droning and bombing. It’s all going to cost us something – but now we are seeing what the price of doing nothing – our refusal to take notice – has been.