 |
| English: Jovan Belcher, a player on the Kansas City Chiefs American football team. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The following day the Chiefs played a football game at Arrowhead Stadium, defeating the Carolina Panthers for only their second victory of the 2012 NFL season. It must have been hard for everyone involved to even think of playing the game under such circumstances.
Cancellation was never an option because the NFL doesn't do business that way. Unless there's a natural disaster or a national catastrophe (think 9/11), life goes on as if nothing ever happened. Heck, they once played an entire schedule of games two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
A few people have tried to turn this tragedy into yet another debate on the merits of gun control, including Bob Costas of NBC echoing the column Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports.com wrote when he delivered his sermon on "Sunday Night Football". Sorry, but we're done talking about this. Even after massacres involving an Arizona congresswoman and a Colorado movie audience, the National Rifle Association and its assorted gun nuts have hollered so much about their Second Amendment rights being taken away that they have intimidated Washington and most state legislatures into keeping things the way they are. After all, guns don't kill people, do they?
We've also heard plenty about the physical effects of concussions and drug use among athletes. What we haven't heard--and this is where we defer to the professionals in the psychological field--is how these also affect the athletes' personal relationships.
Most of all, this isn't about guns or head trauma or drug abuse. It's about domestic violence. It's about those who threaten their significant others if they don't do as they're told. It's about women who simply can't leave a relationship no matter how dangerous it has become, especially if there's children involved. Sometimes they end up dead, restraining order or not.
We don't know what really happened to Jovan Belcher and Kassandra Perkins to set off this chain of events on a Saturday morning in Kansas City. But we do know that those who witnessed what happened are now scarred for life, and that a three-month old girl no longer has parents.
Some things we'll never understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment