Category Archives: American People.

American culture, American People., Culture, faith, family, Life, Logic, motivation, philosphy, pop culture, psychology, Society & Culture, Sports, Uncategorized

We Hope for Baseball

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The collective emotional roller coaster our homes, communities, states, nations and world have experience over the past week cannot be quantified with words.

But damn if it’s not like me to try. Leave it to a pandemic for me to sit down and type my first entry in so long I cannot recall.

The world around us moved so fast last Wednesday that it seemed unreal. The NBA was suspending its season?

Huh.

Thursday saw universities shuttered, college basketball conference tournaments cancelled, high schools move to eLearning.

Um, what?

Friday felt like the bottom fell out, the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament, a new kind of March Madness. Spring sports cancelled – including the College World Series in June – throwing eligibility questions and team rosters for the 2020-21 season into a quagmire that didn’t feel so giggity giggity.

And we thought the news was all filled with doom and gloom before?

I told my wife Friday afternoon that my brain hurt. I couldn’t comprehend much more that day, think of any more angles to cover or next steps after the next steps. I needed wine tequila and a hoodie.

2020 will be forever remembered as when “Social Distancing” became apart of the American lexicon, when everyone from the age of two to 92 could recite proper hand washing protocols.

It will be remembered when we learned everything in our economy is connected, that an essential freeze halted us in our tracks. We quarantined, we worked from home. We overreacted, we under-reacted.

We hoarded toilet paper.

Everything has effectively been put on hold. Youth sports, book clubs. Going out to dinner, a family cookout with grandparents. Spring break. Every Disney Park closed for weeks, every zoo and museum closed. No choir concerts, no parades, no church in person, no events really of any kind.

Everything. Has. Stopped.

But have we learned?

Nothing we didn’t already know.

That faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us, and while the greatest is love, the most important might be hope.

We need to hope we can get back to normal before July. Before June.

We’re holding out hope for high school baseball in our home state. My son, a senior, is a part of a team that won a state championship last season. His friends from his travel teams, scattered across the state, all want the chance to play before college. Most won’t get a chance to play in college, but it is not about that specifically.

It’s about Senior Night. It’s about Prom. It’s about hearing your name called for the final time. Crossing the stage with a diploma at graduation and graduation parties of definitely more than 10 people.

It’s about all we’ve taken for granted. The commute to work filled with podcasts that have fresh content about sports, movies, politics, whatever. Seeing our co-workers, sitting face-to-face in meetings, teaching in a classroom filled with people.

It’s been merely a week, and even the introverts like me don’t think we really understood how significant social distancing could be to the fabric of what it is to be American.

Maybe this is a chance to re-learn, to re-think the daily life and throw our routines out of whack. Are we adaptable? Are we unbeatable? Can we turn a negative, a 100 negatives, into a positive? Are we just catch phrases, or can we rise to the challenge and endure?

We’re always taking about how busy we are (I’m looking at, well, all of us).

Well, how about now? Time to read. Time to listen. Time to think. To take a walk. To get to know our spouses and kids again. To find a way to serve a purpose greater than ourselves.

Maybe this is our wake-up call.

What is truly important, and what is not.

Sure, we’ve clung tight to family. Personally, we haven’t turned into The Shining family around here…yet. And we appreciate our home, our jobs, our friends and our freedoms.

But hope, man.

Hope might be the most fascinatingly human emotion there has ever been. And we need it more than ever.

No matter your beliefs, your political allegiances, whether you call this a hoax or are digging your doomsday bunker as I type, this is history happening for better of worse in real time.

It is a stark reminder we are not in control, not even a little bit, not even at all. But like any good book or movie (that we’ve all probably re-watched or re-read three times by now), hope is a good thing.

It could be the hope we’ll stop losing our ever-loving minds. Hope that those who aren’t taking it serious will wake up to the fact that COVID-19 is a bit more threatening than we thought a week ago, or even a day ago.

Hope is why Hallmark is running Christmas movies in March. It’s why Disney+ put Frozen II up months before they were supposed to. It is why classic sports re-runs are a welcome distraction. Why Tom Brady going to Tampa Bay and leaving New England was something else to talk about for a few hours.

Because we do not know where this going. We do not know the impact on the economy, on our jobs, on our daily lives yet. And we won’t fully for some time.

But we hope.

We hope for the sick, we hope for the cure, for strong leadership, for our friends, for our industries, for our kids.

We hope for an appreciation of the life we lived two weeks ago and for a future that might be close to it.

So, yes, we hope for baseball in this house. And we hold out that hope, because without it, well, it just makes the brain hurt.

Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay good to each other.

Stay hopeful.

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American culture, American People., Culture, Media, Philosophy, Technology, United States

Epilogue

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“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

Several weeks ago, my oldest child turned and asked me a question I’ve been secretly asking myself for months.

“Why haven’t you written anything lately, Dad?”

I stared blankly back at him, my mind firing off excuses – and truths – as to why I had not done any writing since January. I wanted to give a good answer, something philosophical perhaps.

“Just haven’t, buddy,” I said instead.

Wouldn’t Hemingway would be proud of that eloquent answer?

The truth is I kind of already knew why I had not put anything in this space since I bombastically quit Facebook in my last prose.

In fact, I had drafted about five or six pieces in the months since, but deemed them all too heavy, too poor in quality or just gave up out of lack of motivation to finish a post.

I had something on the horrible events in Las Vegas and our loss of humanity in these senseless moments, I had a piece on grief, a piece on Fake News, and one about all the trivial pursuits we chase in life.

And I shared them with no one.

If I’m honest with myself, the lack of writing over the past year is largely due to feeling like all I’d be doing is repeating the same narrative I’ve spent the last five years writing about: society, social media and the loss of identity (both self and national).

Was this writer’s block, or just boredom?

And then it struck me: This blog was really more like a book – or at minimum a long thesis – on a specific topic with chapters done in real time over the previous four or five years as posts. It’s garbled and not in actual hard copy form, and would require massive amounts of editing, a publisher and probably a hundred other things, but look! I wrote a book!

And any book, as such, deserves an epilogue. A director’s cut outtake of the proceedings. So, let’s let this entry serve as an epilogue to this site over the past four or five years.

Here’s why this thread has to stop for me: I am sick of myself when it comes to writing about social media and its impact on our culture. After all this time, I think I’ve made my feelings known.

But here’s why this topic captured me for such a long period of time: I believe what I write, or at least maybe just I want to. Above all, I want it to be genuine. As I’ve claimed many times, we are not the perfect robotic creations our social media feeds make us appear to be.

You see all the smiling photos, the congratulations, the “I’m so proud” comments, and miss the moments of breakdown in between where life is not nearly as pretty. Because life is not always pretty, and it cannot be hashtagged. And we are beautiful, inherently flawed, imperfect human beings.

And those imperfect human beings do horrible things to each other. Looking back, this began on my old blog, with the overly thought title of The Necker Cube. The site had been a platform for me to keep writing about sports after my sports writing career ended (columns, blogs, magazine).

But I grew tired of the sports narrative and the Sandy Hook tragedy caught my attention in such a moving and painful way that I felt compelled to comment on it.

(Note: if you click on some of the older links to these posts, be aware they were pulled from said former site and have not been edited for spacing – i.e. the lines run on strangely).

The entry prior to a post on the events at Sandy Hook, called The Growing Divide, was first entry in this so-called book. And the archives show a writer flipping back and forth for a time between social commentary and traditional sports commentary. Sometimes I even mixed the two.

And then the Boston Marathon bombing happened and I began thinking about Switzerland. I dealt with the backlash of the Ice Bucket Challenge, and Miley Cyrus leading a mini-Molly revolution of “we do what we want” angst.

There was the time I wrote about (one of probably 20 times I did) how we’d become obsessed through social media of giving our opinion on someone’s else’s opinion (what a wormhole). I spent some time holding us accountable. And gave that narrative some additional thoughts. Basically, a lot of it can be solved with kindness.

But I also tried to unwrap the media’s growing fascination with itself and the media’s ever-expanding use of rumors and unnamed sources. All this in an effort to be first – or to incite ratings and division. And we spend a lot of time being divided. There are also the times when the media blurs the lines of reporting, journalism and the monetary backers propping up these outlets.

Part of my problem has been that I just did not want to see us get swallowed by the groupthink and mob mentality. We’ve spent a lot of time on selfies and allowing ourselves to be marginalized. And that bubbling melting pot has been on the verge of boiling over. In fact, one of my last pieces in this series was after the election (and was the second-most read post I’ve ever made at 1,100 views).

Sadly, it has gotten worse – somehow.

Yet, some of my favorite pieces were about my own family and life in raising a large family during this small era. At times, it was like a dark comedy, cause you have to just laugh at the absurdity of it all. At others, it was a serious test of the blurred lines between media responsibility and parenting, with a key example of a Super Bowl Sunday that went in a direction I did not expect. And there was a life-changing family moment that has ripples personally to this day, that many can relate to: the loss of a loved one. (That one, by far the most popular thing I’ve ever written, has garnered over 1,200 reads to date.)

The biggest takeaway? Be present in your life. Put the phone down, maybe not all the time, because that might be unrealistic in late 2017. But being more aware of your surroundings and engage. A couple weeks ago, we had friends over and I’m not sure the four of us looked at our phones the entire night other than to play music. It was glorious.

Over 2.8 billion people are on social media, 1.9 billion on Facebook alone. And roughly 75 percent of all Facebook users spend at least 20 minutes per day on the platform.

It is a trap to make your life appear only as these shared snapshots of happiness. That has an impact on you – and those in your social media sphere.

First, it creates an illusion of you that cannot be sustained. You come to believe in all the “good” so much so that when something even remotely troubling happens, it becomes earth-shattering. All the while, what you were posting and sharing about yourself was a grand illusion, one that you bought into as much as everyone else. We seem to only care if people look, not if they actually see.

Secondly, to those in your sphere, it creates an illusion that they subconsciously cannot compete with either. I am not terribly certain when exactly this occurred in social media, but it’s certainly there, and there is really no denying it.

An opposing view might hold that it is equally unrealistic to expect people to post “bad” things, for fear of being viewed a malcontent or someone just out for sympathy. And there’s probably truth to that, too.

But when it is all said and done, do any of these things matter? If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that I will be far more prone to wishing I had five more minutes with my children, my wife, my family and friends that I will wishing I’d let my two cents on Fake News be known.

All that said…you cannot starve yourself of the things that make you you, to go too long without doing what you enjoy. The reason I haven’t been writing is because, well, I haven’t been writing. But I now realize that’s just because I need a new topic. The longer it goes without writing, the farther that piece of me gets away from who I am today.

I must find a new voice in my writing. Because the social media shaming shtick – while still valid – has been played out in this space. And my hope is this post serves as my last reference, my epilogue, to that being an ill of the world.

In a way, I think we all need to change our voice and find new passions and interests existing alongside our old ones.  You can still be you, but life is meant to be explored and pushed, not compartmentalized.

We called our ancestors settlers, but really that isn’t accurate at all. We are the settlers. Settling in and doing the same old things, without pushing ourselves to be a part of a solution – either just for ourselves (and what ails us spiritually, mentality or physically) – or for the greater world we’re a part of.

I reject that notion that we must settle within ourselves and wait for something to happen. This year, I am thankful for a lot of what I’m always thankful for. But maybe I just take it less for granted that I did before.

After a year of searching, I realize I’ll always be searching in small ways, big ways and all the ways in between.

As the quote at the top states, from Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

So maybe I will find a new voice soon and keep writing. Or maybe I won’t.

One thing is for certain: It is definitely more about the journey – and what we see – than it is what we are looking at.

Time to reawake my soul, open my eyes to see.

Onward – and upward – we go.

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American culture, American People., American Politics, Uncategorized

Kites in Hurricanes

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From the jump, let us set the record straight about this presidential election and this primary: you don’t matter.

I know you want to think you do, and it is by far more pleasing to the senses to believe you do.

But you do not matter. And you do not matter because you do not allow yourself to.

To steal from the quotable Mr. White in the most recent Bond film, Spectre: “You’re a kite, dancing in a hurricane.”

Precisely because we do not realize this is why we play right into the hands of the powerful elite which capitalize on everything we don’t do.

We would rather take selfies and complain about something inconsequential than change ourselves, our families and our communities. We ask a lot of whys, bluster on about what’s wrong and then go back to the Bey-hive to taunt celebrities because we’ve analyzed some song lyrics like a conspiracy theorist.

In one week, for the first time in eons, my home state of Indiana believes it will finally play a role in helping shape a presidential election.

On the surface, it does. It appears that Indiana’s voters, with their early May primary, may have a say in who the presidential candidates will be for the Democrats and Republicans in the fall.

But dig a little deeper. Indiana’s voters have the same sway in this as those in Iowa, North Carolina and Mississippi did – which is to say, very little.

You do realize, you’re not really voting for a candidate. You are voting for a recommendation of a candidate to a delegate that you have never heard of that has been assigned to your district. Those delegates will go to the conventions and do basically whatever the heck they want. In a protested – er, contested – convention, delegates are bound to represent their district on the first ballot only.

Except now we’re told that in many states, that is not even the case, that technically speaking, somebody you don’t know can do whatever they please with that all important vote on the very first ballot. So whether you voted for Trump, Cruz or Mickey Mouse, that may not even matter for the first ballot.

And we’ve not even talked about Super Delegates. Let’s just say Captain America, they are not. You know what, never mind.

The fact is, it’s not about the candidate you detest or support so much as it is an exposed process whereby someone can get the majority of the votes after a long, arduous primary process and be denied the nomination by unknown foot soldiers of an establishment.

Are these the rules? You betcha. I suppose you got me there. But this is also not about the “will of the people.” Rules from state parties, delegations and delegates are as much a power play as a massive monetary donation from a corporation. There is little difference in what power they can wield behind the scenes.

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For decades, we’ve worried about the role of money in politics and how it influences decisions. Well, we should also worry a great deal about who controls the game and writes the rule book on that, too. It’s hard to tell who the puppet masters are anymore.

To me, this is truly much less about the name or personality – or even one’s personal feelings on a particular candidate. It is about the will of the people and the false message somehow portrayed that we are a democracy. We are not. We are a federal republic. We vote for representatives. And if you’re wondering why less and less people vote, it is because of this very notion: they feel their vote doesn’t matter.

In 2016, how we feel matters much, much more than things like truth or reality. That’s not an endorsement, either. Just a simple statement of fact.

We want our vote to matter – it’s why we push for voting, why we show the popular vote and tally it all up. But the confusion comes when terms like “districts” and “lines” and “delegates” and “bound” and “unbound” pop into our every day vernacular.

The average American citizen – of which there are far greater number than the political class – sees a name on a ballot and marks next to it believing their vote has been cast for that person. If that candidate has more votes than another person, the average citizen is inclined, by simple deductive reasoning, to believe that is the winner.

Except the winner is not always the winner. There are games to be played and delegates to be swooned. And even if you pull in roughly 20 percent of the vote, and your opponent is vilified more than you, you can be the winner.

I minored in political science and have been somewhat active and engaged in politics in a variety of ways for years. And I understand it all – but I definitely don’t get it. The country that champions pamphlets like “Common Sense” doesn’t seem to have any. The typically smarmy media types freely admit they don’t get it, either.

We speak of our founding fathers in glorified tones, and for the most part, it is true. Intellectual, forward-thinking and dynamic leaders they were, they also didn’t have the foresight to deal with race or gender or terrorist attacks or cyber-threats and digital privacy. A product of their time, they despised a King across an ocean telling them they owed more taxes for the products they consumed or created. They wanted the power of those governmental decisions to rest in their hands and on their soil.

Thus, the political system our country was founded on was self-serving. It was a power play, a power grab and they executed it beautifully. And they carefully crafted a foundational document to serve as a blueprint to young nation meant on doing things in a much better way, where the voice and the will of the people would have input – but not the ultimate final decision.

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Do most of us understand this? We have the power to elect someone to represent us – at least once we get to November – and even then, you may not like your choices. But until that point, you have far less say. Money, corporations and power players bring us to the ballot box each and every election.

That is, seemingly, until this year. This is our revolt, on both parties. We’ve largely rejected traditional notions this cycle. Perhaps not you, but the larger We has.

Donald Trump is a lot of things. And while it may be difficult to digest, while many are disgusted by the very idea of him getting even this far, the simple fact is at the ballot box, in state after state, he’s winning the votes of those casting a ballot.

That is not an endorsement or a sentence of support for him as a person or even as a candidate. It’s a statement of fact. And while the collective spin room of the Republican National Committee, the national media, the remaining candidates and the candidates that have been eliminated clamor about blocking him due to the “will of the people,” it can be reasonably deduced that the people are rejecting something.

Did it ever occur that this could be less about Donald Trump and more about the other candidates or the party or the system?

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” – George Orwell

Here is where we stand, where we have always stood. Our voice can be heard through votes. For all the blustering and protests and social media posts about it, you can make your voice resonate through voting. If you do not like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton or John Kasich, you vote for someone else.

But what I think we’re all really hearing is there is true majority that doesn’t like any candidate. If that is the case, it requires much more effort and involvement from a collection of people who have yet to show they are willing to do what is necessary. It is grassroots, it is time consuming. It is organizing an effort to promote someone else who may not even be known or who may not even be running. Maybe you should run for office locally. To make changes, it requires changing your behavior first. It requires action. It requires talking to people, gathering a coalition of support and signatures.

That is, if it matters. But the vast majority of us is silent. The vast majority of the nation do not vote, do not get involved. Thus, to the victors, to the workers, organizers and monetary backers go the spoils.

We play into their hands when the extent of our involvement is complaining on social media, in a post stuck between a selfie, a Game of Thrones recap and an analysis of just who is Becky with the good hair.

We disappoint ourselves on a daily basis far more than the political candidates we don’t want to vote for. In fact, we create the vacuum of leadership for their existence in the first place.

In the immortal words of Ice-T, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

 

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American culture, American People., American Politics, Uncategorized

Bern Notice

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How many times can you hear it?

This is the most “important” election of our lifetime.

Are things bad? Sure seems like it. Sure feels like it.

But in the vast history of this, our planet earth, we’ve probably experienced millions of potential tipping points. The clock always seems to read somewhere between five and seven minutes to midnight.

Doomsday is just around the corner.

Propelled by a media that abuses the medium for the purposes of ratings that return a financial windfall, we’re sucked into a web of negativity. And like the sheep we are, we digest this poison and ask for more.

Essentially, we are backfeeding our future, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity across all forms of relationships. From our unique self “we” to the collective “we” as Americans.

Long before the rise of Donald Trump, we went negative. We went nationalist and extremist and chided others for not thinking like we do. It’s all right there in our social media feeds. We have been doing this dance inside America for a long time. Every time we slam somebody else we’re creating divisiveness. And over some of the most inconsequential topics imaginable – like sports or professions.

So when you act shocked how someone like Donald Trump could be the leading Republican candidate for President of the United States, you shouldn’t be.

Oh, you can be stunned by how it got this far, not vote for him, and not agree with anything he says. Because the truth is, rhetoric is more than just words when it comes from a candidate trying to be elected to one of the highest positions of power in the world.

But understand all the same we created these candidates, and the vacuum that allowed them to waltz into our lives. It’s like a bad joke: “A billionaire, two liars, and a socialist walk into a bar…” – and I don’t think we want to stick around for the punchline.

Ironically, we seem to want someone who plays nice in the sandbox, except we don’t play nice in the sandbox ourselves.

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Our celebrity culture, our reality-era need for confrontation paved the way for Trump. Our own inferiority complexes made this possible. We mock Trump for his paranoia over the size of his hands, yet we take five selfies until we get the right angle so our chin doesn’t look fat.

We want to tell people to shut up sometimes. And increasingly with social media, we do. We want to call someone who annoys us, and doesn’t see things our way, something condescending, like, ‘Little Marco’ for instance.

We attack people who we think show too many pictures of their kids. We attack people who we think show too many pictures of their dogs or cats. We attack people who root for another sports team or player or coach we don’t like. We mock, we belittle, we deride with smarm and sarcasm, with passive-aggressive undertones. And then when the other party gets offended, we tell them to relax, that was “all in fun” or just “a joke.”

So, you see, there’s a little bit of The Donald in all of us, like it or not.

It doesn’t mean he’s a quality candidate for President of the United States. It means there is a very obvious reason he’s even a candidate for President of the United States.

This same analysis can be applied to Bernie Sanders. A truly shocking number of people – the vast majority of them young – “feel the Bern.”

And truthfully, this phenomenon should be far more concerning than the “Make America Great Again” reality show of Donald Trump.

The short-term and long-term proposition that millions of young Americans are flocking to the polls to vote for a white socialist in his mid-70s, who has unapologetically defended socialism all over the world, should be beyond frightening for Americans.

Never mind the truth that we’ve neglected to apparently teach millennials what socialism truly is, and what it can do. It reads like a utopia, but looks and smells like a dirty trash can filled with poo.

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Currently, 20 percent of the world’s population continues to live under communist regimes, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea. Not surprisingly, they also remain the largest violators of human rights in history. The opposition suppressed, detained, imprisoned, murdered.

You want to really be scared? Nearly 73% of Americans couldn’t tell you the cause of the Cold War just five years ago. That’s a question asked on the test for official U.S. Citizenship. Guaranteed, that number has gone up.

And if you are one of those, put down the Candy Crush and pick-up any text from your junior year high school history class.

How could we ever arrive at a point that we’re falling for the false sirens of socialism? Perhaps it begins with participation ribbons and trophies. We coddle ourselves. We are all special and unique in our own way, sure, but that doesn’t mean little Johnny didn’t work 10 times harder than little Timmy in order to rise to the top of the ranks. And this doesn’t just apply to sports. The valedictorian earned their As, the kid who didn’t study earned their C-.

That’s America. Or at least it was.

Now, we are an America that apparently thinks it is cool to hang out with Cuba, despite their political affiliation, despite their horrid human rights history and despite the violence and unspeakable poverty taking place in the streets outside the stadium where a baseball game was played yesterday, with our president wearing some shades and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the stands.

The island in the sun, where everyone is completely equal, and treated equal, and lives a life of equality is a mirage. That mirage is socialism. There is no incentive. What’s yours is mine.

And forget being what you want to be. Want to be a doctor? Tough. Janitor. Want to be a janitor? Sorry, pig farmer. Want to be a pig farmer? Sorry, accountant.

You’ll be told what your role is by someone else. Identity and self-worth are stripped away. You are not an individual; you are just another person to keep the government functioning. A government that provides you with what little you have, which is the exact same as everyone else, no matter how hard you work or what you do, so you might want to watch what you say and where you say it, too. Don’t try and do it through art or music or literature, either.

Our American ancestors fought over 240 years ago for freedom from oppression and tyranny. Countries and citizens of nations the world over have begged and fought for freedom through generations, and once they got it, exposed the horrors of how fascism, socialism and communism ruined their lives, their families and their country.

But no one watches “60 Minutes” anymore, we’re too busy keeping up with Kardashians.

And now we have a majority of a generation who want to bring to that kind of political system to the ultimate beacon of freedom, the United States, just so they don’t have to pay for college or healthcare.

Never mind that it will be a college experience devoid of individual analysis and thought, where subjects and courses will be selected and pre-screened by the government…actually, wait, in socialism, is there even a need for college?

Must be why it’s free.

We are spoiled and entitled brats. Most of you reading won’t finish the 1,700 words in this blog – I know, you’ve got to get back to Facebook’s version of America’s funniest home videos.

But that is the vacuum we created that allowed us to feel the Bern.

Socialism, for in practice often known as communism, strips the mind, the body and the soul of individuality, of incentive, of self-worth.

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But we don’t read Orwell anymore. Animal Farm probably invokes thoughts of a children’s book and 1984 is just a year in the past.

When the Cold War ended, there was an enormous drop-off in mass killings around the globe. When the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University researched this through a task force, it found the reason was because millions were freed from communism and police states at that time.

Despite what you read and hear through the media, mass killings around the globe have remained low for over 20 years. In fact, the 2010s are the some of the lowest in history.

But our younger, millennial brethren were born after all this Cold War mumbo jumbo. The Day After Tomorrow is more plausible to younger Americans than WarGames. Anyone younger than 28 doesn’t remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. To them, it is just text and pictures in a book.

Sanders will most likely not win this election. But millenials will take over as the largest sub-demographic of America in the not so distant future. And not one of them ever had a siren test for a nuclear war in grade school. This primary season should serve as warning to the disconnect we’ve created in our society.

We cannot protect and coddle anymore. There are no more participation trophies to give.

To be sure, America has its share of problems and issues. There will never be a utopia here on earth because of the humans that inhabit it. We are not perfect, nor will we ever be. We should always strive to do the best we can to care for one another, to root out injustice wherever possible and reduce the violent nature that stirs within the souls of the lost and help bring hope to the hopeless.

But do not mistake that kindness, that good intent, with willing subjugation.

Americans work hard. We compete. We push ourselves and go for our dreams. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. We’re gamblers, boundary-pushers and risk-takers.

But this isn’t Manor Farm.

If we’re going to become the anti-thesis of what we are and what we have been, if we’re going to backfeed into some twisted version of the future that is as dystopian as the media portrays, then I guess given the choice, there is no choice.

Better to let the clock tick to 11:58pm than have a society so lazy and unmotivated it just rolls over and falls back asleep when the alarm goes off.

Hitting snooze doesn’t save us.

Get up, America. It is time to get to work.

This is your Bern Notice.

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American culture, American People., Society & Culture

Less Than Super Sunday

For many, Super Bowl XLIX will always be about the game, the way in which it ended and the enduring legacies of the key participants on both sides.

For me, it will always be about the moment I understood the complexities of being a parent. With four children and a fifth on the way, perhaps that moment should have come sooner. Alas, maybe it is only now that I fully understand it.

In many ways, especially as someone who was rooting for the villainous New England Patriots, I wish the game would remain tucked away in the recesses of my memories as one that solidified Tom Brady as the NFL’s greatest quarterback (purely an opinion). I’d like to remember his nearly perfect fourth quarter, bringing the Patriots back from 10 points down and collecting a record-tying fourth Super Bowl ring.

I’d like to vaguely recall in 20 years the look of horror on Richard Sherman and Pete Carroll when that pass was intercepted – but only because it serves as a reminder of how sports can change on a dime, how cruel they can be and how nothing is guaranteed in life (pretty much fact).

And perhaps I will remember all of these things. But I also know that I will remember more about the commercials than anything else. The ads themselves might not be that memorable, but I am certain to not forget the reactions in our house to them.

Especially those of my 8-year-old daughter.

Perhaps it was my fault. I had hyped the game to our precocious second-oldest – and only girl – for hours. The boys and my wife were easy, they were ready for four hours of football’s grandest theatrics and for what would ensue – their father hollering at the TV and cheering wildly for a team that no one else in our area liked.

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And man, she was all in. Wearing a throwback Welker jersey from her brother’s closet, our daughter placed herself in a chair next to me and basically did not move – or wasn’t allowed to – for the duration of the game.

Dad’s superstitious nature kicked in just briefly after kickoff. Every Patriots first down, I ran the room and high-fived, in order, our oldest son (12), the youngest son (3), my wife and then returned to give the biggest, double high-five to our daughter before sitting the exact same way we had the play before. (Meanwhile, our 6-year-old son went back in for the between the iPad and the game and playing with toys. Sigh. I took what I could get.)

She squeezed my arm on big third downs, asked all kinds of questions about the rules and the game and cheered to please us at first, then later because she seemed to actually, briefly, kinda care.

Soon, this became as entertaining as the game. My daughter and I were enjoying a bonding moment within the bonding moment of our family.

As the game stayed tight and tension mounted, we were all glued to the TV.

Which included the commercials.

It began with the dead-child Nationwide commercial in the second quarter and ran right on through to the game’s end, specifically, Always #LikeAGirl, Victoria’s Secret and the 50 Shades of Grey trailer.

There is no one way to adequately describe the confusion on a child’s face in, what for a parent, is an awkward moment. There is also not a great way to address the confusion without convoluting it further and getting more questions.

“Why is the boy dead?”

“Why didn’t the parents stop the bath water?”

“I don’t run like that. That’s not funny.”

“Are they making fun of girls?”

“She’s not wearing very many clothes.”

“Those people are kissing a lot and kissing really weird.”

Thanks, guys. Really, just a bang-up job, advertisers. Why didn’t you just air a commercial debunking Santa Claus or an documentary on where babies come from?

And look, n the heels of a national discussion (again) on if athletes are role models and how they are not the parents, there’s Marshawn Lynch grabbing his crotch again. And if he wasn’t, people were talking about it.

Stating the obvious: My wife and I raise our children. No one else. Ultimately, how they turn out is a far greater reflection on us than it is society in general. Yet in being a parent, you’d like to shield them from certain topics and situations for as long as possible, because, as science has proven, their minds just are not ready for it yet.

And it is a simple fact that kids are influenced by their peers, other family members and yes, who they see in movies and on television. You know how I know this? Because I was a kid once. I wore the shoes, rolled the jeans. I acted like my favorite players on the court or diamond.

Back in the 1990s, we had a whole Gatorade campaign centered on “Being Like Mike” for goodness sakes. It was aimed at kids.

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Advertising has not changed who it targets, but the topics and the boundaries of those messages have changed.

I have heard it described like this: we urge caution with young athletes lifting weights, noting how the body structure of a 14-year-old is not meant to handle too much lifting because the frame cannot handle the weight. The same is true for the brain. An 8-year-old is can comprehend more than a 6-year-old, but not as much as say a 12-year-old.

These ads, geared towards adults, are viewed by kids who simply cannot contextually understand them. From what the ads mean, to what they infer. They may contain a message, but the absorption of that message is varies widely based upon the receiver.

And we simply do not care.

As eyes begin to roll of readers who fear I’m just complaining or bemoaning something else in society, I’d venture to say you don’t have children. You’d suggest we turn it off, that we have a choice in the matter, that the media does not raise and influence my child.

Some may say that we’ve always had this (though, as noted above, there is a significant difference in “Being Like Mike” and talking about the ghost of a kid whose parents were either a) neglectful or b) neglectful and without Nationwide’s accidental home prevention training.)

My response to this is humble and contrite: it is the right of my wife and I to determine if and when we talk about these issues or topics. They normally don’t see these ads, because our children are not normally up  past 8:45-9:00pm. But the Super Bowl is anything but normal.

I’d rather not be forced to address my daughter’s self-esteem during the Super Bowl because the ad #LikeAGirl – a positive message overall – was viewed incorrectly in the eyes of an 8-year-old simply because she was eight and thought they were making fun of her.

“I don’t run like that, Daddy.”

“I don’t throw like that, either.”

No amount of “I know you don’t” or “that’s not what they meant” could remove the furrowed brow of my little girl. She just didn’t understand the point. In her eyes, she didn’t even know there was a image issue to begin with. But hey, thanks Always for putting it out there.

Is it the advertiser’s responsibility to control the message? At the very least, perhaps a little?

The same as Marshawn Lynch grabbing his crotch with millions of young football players watching him, he controls the message. I can tell my kids that something is wrong or not right, but the follow-up is the same as it was 25 years ago when I was a kid: “But why does he get to do it?”

Explaining six figure fines doesn’t really address that question, either.

I can defend Lynch over not speaking to the media. It does little harm and makes a mockery of what the current sports media has become. Any reporter who can tell you with a straight face they need Marshawn Lynch to write a story about the NFL, Super Bowl XLIX or the Seattle Seahawks is a reporter who is not very good at their job. Write something else, don’t give him the attention and move on.

But I cannot defend or pretend to agree with lewd gestures as an alternate sign of rebellion to the league. Kids don’t know or get that. All they see is the action, not the message.

To Marshawn Lynch, Charles Barkley before him – and all the athletes in between who feel they are not role models, I remain disappointed. No, you are not the role model for my kids. Yes, my wife and I should be and hopefully are. But it is naïve and irresponsible to pretend you are not at minimum an influencer of children everywhere who watch you play and want to be like you. It comes with the millions of dollars, the fans and the fame. They may not know you, but they know you can play and play well.

Show some decency, respect yourself and others with your actions. Athletes demand respect all the time, then do little to earn it with actions such as these. Don’t ask us to embrace you and cheer for you, then pretend to poop out the football.

Similarly, these companies and ad agencies hold the power to do a delicate balance of creative marketing and societal responsibility.

Run your child death ad at 10pm on a Tuesday night, Nationwide. Otherwise, you are anything but on my side. If my kid is awake and watching, that one is on me.

But they knew the reaction the ad would draw, they knew it would spike Twitter trends, Google searches. They knew the value of the ad would increase significantly with that kind of ad, in that moment and the kind of reaction it would garner.

There is no great call to arms coming here. Not this time. I don’t have a solution for something the majority of us do not see as a problem.

I just have disappointment.

My only hope is my daughter remembers the high fives and not the commercials.

Maybe someday, I will too.

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