Reading hearts, as if that were the be-all-end-all, versus judging actions in the PC Police World of tolerance and diversity that is the National Football League
At age 16, I put one of my best friends out of my first car (a 1969 Chevelle Mailbu 350, metallic blue with a white vinyl top thank you very much) at night and in the woods several miles from home, because he used the n-word in my car while also wearing a Rebel Flag t-shirt only partially hidden under his flannel teen-age-rebellion CPO shirt. Prior notice had been given before our mid-1970s suburban “choom” patrol entered the common carrier of the son of the coach of the first integrated Little League team in my South Carolina hometown. And in the mid-1980s we hired one of the first black paralegals in the county, so we have earned our anti-N-word bona fides.
That said, we marvel at what we see as both an out-sized emphasis placed upon the use of “words” as opposed to “sticks and stones” that hurt more, when it comes to the utterances from paler faces; as well as excessive tolerance for N-, GD-, and MF-word-laced profanity from hip hop peeps of color.
In evaluating the seriousness of the offense of Philadelphia Eagles’ wide receiver Riley Cooper’s surreptitiously-video-taped (it wasn’t produced my Motown mixers for public distribution) n-word tirade at a Black security guard denying backstage entry, despite supposed NFL-gladiator, celebrity-entitlement, at a Kenny Chesney concert; can we first dispense with the assumed conventional PC-police wisdom that one “tells the truth” when they speak in anger and that the use of the n-word in anger by a Caucasian means they are a “racist” at heart and so obviously must be exiled from the polite society of Snoop Dog and Jay-Z.
When human beings of any color gets mad at another and directs verbal assaults at another, they often state what is assumed will most enrage the object of their anger, whether it be diatribes based upon their looks, whether their mama wears army boots or any other irrelevant matter that pops into their non-thinking mind.
I don’t read hearts. I gave it up soon after I heard a then-fellow Democrat (I finally mustered the courage to leave the identity politics party for the Party of Lincoln in the Summer of 2001, but I digress) judge the hearts of early 1990s Republicans as racists and sexists with no compassion for the poor; despite the existence of so many GOP employers of Blacks and Women that we both knew and the manifold proof of the poverty-destroying economic policies of Reagan that Clinton Democrats were only too happy to follow.
Full stop. I loathe the use of the N-word except in an intellectual discussion or employed in literature or film for accurate depictions of certain historical eras. I consider it a scandal that the liberal Democrat cultural establishment has erected two sets of rules of decorum for Whites and Blacks since the late-1960s that essentially tolerate redneck behavior from Blacks while requiring Whites to walk through a PC-police landmine everyday, dependent upon the arbitrary feelings of the most “sensitive” grievance-seeker for approval of their conduct.
Hence the evolution of the culture of NFL locker rooms, as reported by former Eagle Garry Cobb:
On a number of occasions I’ve been walking through the Eagles locker room and have overheard a couple of African-American players talking and one guy will say to the other, “Look n-word”. I’ve stopped and squirmed at hearing it. At times I’ve told them to stop using that word, while they’ve been other times when I just kept walking. You hear it all the time from today’s players. They’ve grown up listening to eat in all types of movies and music. They’ve been using their word all their lives, so they see nothing wrong with using at work or any other place.
During the years when I was playing in the NFL, black players wouldn’t use that word in front of white players. There were only a few players who would use the word at all, but they would never use it at work in front of black and white players. Now things have changed. Nowadays, players will use that word like they were saying “hey brother” and it’s regarded as no big deal. They use it in any and every occasion. It’s the culture they grew up in and they see no reason to change.
Many times players will have music blaring out of their cell phones which has that word being said over and over and over in it. Riley Cooper and his wide receiver teammates listen to some of that music. He tries to be cool like all of the black guys on the team, but now it’s gotten out of control. He has probably been using that word on his own and he mistakenly let it slip out of his mouth while in front of a camera. People who use profanity all the time, can’t help but use it if they become angered or emotional about something. Cooper had been drinking before the incident occurred and he had been angered by a security guards before using the N-word.
We live in a nation that made the freedom of speech part of the first rights protected in the Bill of Rights, which essentially means that the government can’t jail for speaking your mind (with some exceptions, including defamation). But we also live in a nation that has, thankfully, not yet totally destroyed private property and contract rights, despite the double-standards applied in interpreting them by the liberal elite.
One would hope that the elite in the culture would exert such wholesome influences that the taking of the Lord’s name in G-D-vain were anathema. Instead, we twice elect as President of the United States a man who parked his butt in the pews of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright who proudly transgressed the Third Commandment to trash America, from the pulpit no less. One would hope that our culture would so revere women that rappers. who incessantly refer to them my the B-, C-, and Ho-words and that insult men as MFs, would not be held up as role models.
We welcome the lesson in forgiveness from the Eagles’ Rev. Michael Vick (whose apology for serial cruelty to Man’s Best Friend is believed and respected by this Fighting Gamecock). But the reason we can be most assured that Vick’s “heart” is now acceptable and thus worthy to pontificate on the Cooper matter has been his actions since his incarceration and suspension. We don’t judge the content of Michael Vick’s dog-loving character solely on his crimes during the first decade of the 21st Century. Neither should the worthiness of Riley Cooper to re-join a locker room where the N-word is as ubiquitous of sweaty socks be solely based upon a drunken tirade in which he used the most popular word starting with the letter “n” uttered in by cloistered Philly footballers. How Riley Cooper has treated teammates of all hues over the past four years in the City of Brotherly Love surely carries overwhelming weight in the team’s determination of his acceptability back in the locker room.
But just as “forgiveness” should not necessarily mean that Jimmy Swaggert gets remain Pastor or Bill Clinton Commander-in-Chief, neither should adultery and profanity necessarily mean permanent shunning. Only serial Weiner-sexting, the pardoning of Puerto Rican terrorists for a Hillary Clinton that employs a female slavery-loving Muslim Brotherhood Huma-Weiner deserves banishment to the Islands Elbe.
Mike DeVine‘s Right.com
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
