The San Francisco 49ers-Oakland Raiders Preseason Series Should Still be Played

What boggles my mind is that The Candlestick Park shootings, according to the San Jose Mercury News' Tim Kawakami, will signal the end of a whole series of preseason games between the Oakland Raiders and San Francisco 49ers. I had a reaction contrary to the popular opinion here.

Can it really be the NFL made this decision because one wore a slightly offensive tee shirt?  Offensive to whom, I must ask. 

We all should be used to offensive tee shirts by now.  They’ve been around, after all, for a full 50 years, since the 1960’s.  For denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area, this one tee shirt and its brief if direct message is really rather mild. 

We also should be familiar with violence erupting in public places.  We lost a mayor and a councilman that way once, and the Bay Area is not a stranger to violence.  After all, this area came to national prominence during the colorful and violent gold rush days of, um, ’49. 

So it seems to me that this cancellation of a traditional series is one of those all-too-common over-reactions by NFL authorities to a rather common occurrence. 

It is the familiar reaction of the bureaucratic mind to a single incident.  Prevent it from “ever happening again,” a hollow and ineffective reaction.  Nothing will ever prevent it from ever happening again.  “It,” whatever the emergency is, history shows, always happens again regardless of the actions of authorities to prevent it. 

A kid shows up at school with an aspirin and they expel her for carrying drugs?  You carry a full sized shampoo bottle into an airport and they confiscate it?  A teacher tells a disruptive student to sit down and shut up, and they fire her for abusing him?  

Some guy makes a bad slightly drunken joke on an airplane and they make an emergency landing at the nearest airport surrounded with Federal Marshals?  A teacher gets hit in the back of the head with a spit wad, and holds the entire class in from recess because no one will rat on the person with the perfect aim? 

So we will all suffer because two fools carried guns into Candlestick.  I love the rivalry between the Raiders and 49ers.  It is the historically familiar, if fictional, contest between our guys and their guys.  When I lived in Hayward, I rooted for the Raiders.  When I moved to San Francisco, I rooted for the 49ers.  I am a typical fickle fan.  It is, after all, if incredibly lucrative to a very few, only a game to me. 

Zero-tolerance is nothing less than the spineless abandonment of the duty of authority figures to make informed decisions on a case-by-case basis and then stand up to the heat for making them. 

Silliness, pettiness and cowardly behavior prevail among the authorities in this day and age.  It is this squeamishness that caused this ill-advised decision.  

And it is a decision that hurts the whole class of us fans, just because of the ill-advised behavior of two fans out of tens of thousands.