August 28, 2019

Modern journalists.

I am seeing so much ink about the sudden retirement of Andrew Luck. One sportswriter even brought Rob Gronkowski into the early retirement discussion. One sportswriter even talked about a marginal NFL player who chose to retire at 24 or 25.

One name that I have not heard a peep about is Barry Sanders. Barry Sanders chose to walk away from football and never look back at the time that he was THE force in the NFL. Defenses gameplanned for him and still could not stop him on a consistent or even remotely consistent basis. I remember my reaction when Barry Sanders walked away from the game. Eventhough I was not a Detroit Lions fan, his retirement literally took the air out of my lungs. It was always great to watch NFL reports about how Barry Sanders had or was carving up a defense that had planned all week exclusively to stop him.

I just view modern sportswriters and journalists in general as completely lacking the ability to reference history when crafting reports. That shortcoming affects sports and politics, so we can't get an accurate comparison of why Luck may want to retire from football and why life won't end and may get better for him. Because journalists don't have the ability to frame today's reports in the shadow of what history has taught us, we get a mental midget in Donald Trump as President.

At times the whole affair is disgusting. It would be great to have sportswriters and political journalists that can shape their writings through the prism of what history has taught us.

August 3, 2019

What have we become.

It is estimated to up to 20 people in El Paso were shot dead earlier today. One witness described a White man in tactical clothing as the killer. Even as disturbing is how print news is treating the shooting. I can find two stories about the death of RFK's granddaughter in my news feed, not one headline story about the shooting.

Are people becoming immune? This morning I was shopping in a grocery store when I heard a yell from in front. Instantly my head wheeled and a fight or flee sensation overtook me. Apparently the person that yelled was frustrated about sonething, not a murderous psycho, in seconds things were back to normal for me.

It just seems that now everytime we step out, being part of a mass shooting should be somewhere in our heads, even if we don't think it is, it is there as I found out this morning. All that is awfully sad and it is made far worse by a president who traffics in hate and creating divisions between groups of people, all for his own benefit.