Pro Sports: The Opiate of the American People

Before I begin I must inform any readers that this is an editorial piece and not a hard news article. I am expressing my opinion on a subject that has many interpretations. I apologize to no one for expressing my opinion and I encourage discussion and even debate for any other interpretation and welcome the idea of having my perspective altered.

Living in Northern Virginia the past few years, I have watched and contemplated the caliber of society we perpetuate as one of the wealthiest counties in all America.

I believe and, dare say, know that what is considered normal and expected is actually very far from normal in terms of humanity as a species. Nowhere else in the world do people live with the privileges every citizen in the U.S. has and takes for granted on a daily basis. In fact, my right to express this opinion without fear of some sort or restraint of some kind is a concept that many people around the world have never known.

In this respect, I find that American's idealization and romantic entanglement with professional sports and entertainment is quite astonishingly mad.

Don't misinterpret my analysis for a distaste for pro sports. I am just as taken with it as anyone else, and more so than many, but on a purely socially-relevant-to-world-affairs level; the fact is we've created a multi-billion dollar industry that in no way need exist.

As a country, we idolize professional athletes and entertainers; it is born of a necessity that, as self-aware human beings, we require activities and challenges that allow us to experience—not just survival and existence—but a sense of meaning to said existence.

In this respect, we have created many institutions that scientifically serve no purpose other than to provide and escape from the fear of the unknown we share as a people.

I find it baffling that in a time of war, poverty, and terror in much of the world we wrap ourselves in the warmth of a series of activities that really makes no sense. We hold the participants in higher esteem than those making a real impact upon the world and our future.

The minimum salary for a Major League Baseball player is $390,000 a year—yet our educators, who are responsible for shaping an aspect of who we are, earn barely more than a poverty level income.

I am afraid my opinion is one born of angst at myself, as well as society in some ways, because it seems that society has moved away from seeking out new knowledge and prefers to occupy itself with the inconsequential.

Five hundred years from today I would be willing to wager that no one on Earth (should there be anyone at that time) will care or know what baseball, or football, or any other sport of our era was or who played them unless anthropology and archaeology become modern sports storytellers.

My point is that, while I love sports to a fault, there is a need to extricate or distance ourselves as a society from emphasizing their true importance. We must begin a shift back towards bettering ourselves as a society and place value on the people who truly deserve it—not those who entertain us.