Recently, the National Football League has proven to be a bottomless gold mine for all moral (and pseudo-moral) gold-diggers in this part of the planet.  And the treasure is so close to the top of the ground, so accessible!  What produced it all?  The recent discovery that some NFL players, all ripped masculine types, are batting women around.  Men batting women around! To quote an anonymous fifth-grade philosopher, “Well, DUH!”  No honest person would be surprised, alas, to hear that Adam might have been a little too rough with Eve in some excitable moment.  Speaking generally, the physically stronger sex has been doing that to the physically weaker sex literally since time immemorial.

For starters, no male should ever strike a female.  Period. End of story.  Punta finale.  Obviously, it is conceivable that there are legitimate exceptions, but, as they say, “the exceptions prove the rule.”  (I personally thought it was ludicrous, parenthetically, for a “million” men to gather some time ago at the DC Mall, raise their hands to heaven and swear, vociferously, that they would “never raise their hand(s) against a woman.”  A trip to DC to deepen one’s moral sensitivities?  What a waste of airfare!)

I gently suggest, here, that the avid nugget-gatherers in the NFL gold-mine consider, if only for a moment, their utter and arrant hypocrisy.  Yes, the NFL, but why only the NFL?  What about Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the PGA, professional (or non-professional!) boxers, the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment!), etc., ad infinitum.  No mistreated females in those realms?  At the moment, the NFL gold-mine alone is being worked.  But, hey, the larger question is not why just the NFL, but why just sports?

Here’s a map to a monstrous labyrinth of man-hits-woman gold-mines: What about truck-drivers?  As a class, I mean, as are NFL players.  What about mailmen?  What about, uh, authors or painters or sculptors or musicians?  How about philosophy professors?  Or doctors or lawyers?  (Include judges in that grouping!)?  Or corporate CEOs?  And what about clergy types: pastors, rabbis, priests, imams?  For God’s sake, what about politicians!  (Mother-lode?)  Dare I mention Hollywood and all media types?  Who remembers a Hollywood celeb being outed as an abuser (except in a gossip rag which normal humans don’t read, and only dupes believe) with screams to pull his Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership and fire him and his associates immediately with public ceremony and without pay?  When was the last time we heard of a reporter of any sort labeled, publicly, as an abuser, and suffering nation-wide opprobrium as have the NFLers?

Look, the NFL screwed up royally, from top to bottom, on this deal.  Preposterously!  That is as obvious as the noon-day summer sun in a cloudless sky.  Neither the king nor his acolytes have any clothes on! A nd may never be able to purchase enough to cover their nakedness!  I am not asking for a free ride for them, but for a fair ride for everybody.  Right across the board.  As Mark Twain’s Mulberry Sellers said, “there’s gold in them thar (other) hills!” No charge for the heads up on their location. Just sayin’!

Bill Anderson

Grapevine, Texas