F the NFL

I’d love to see it mothballed permanently. Much like the Armed Forces, it is an organization that treats men’s bodies as disposable and cares nothing for the lives of its players after they are no longer profitable to the the team owners. Indeed, even when the players are making money for the league (and, yes, for themselves, in the short term), players are treated as beasts of burden — expected to bury the pain of their injuries in oceans of pain killers in order to play. The treatment results in grave addiction issues and lifetimes of chronic pain. Most grave is the issue of CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brain damage that is the result of repeated concussions. The New York Times recently published a study looking at 111 brains of retired NFL players. 110 showed signs of CTE. CTE destroys memory and causes suicidal depression. As someone who dealt with a year-long suicidal depression (resulting from a medication mishap), I can say that it is an acute form of suffering that has few equals in the human experience. A sport that is predicated upon such severe and chronic bodily and brain injury is a sport that is horseshit and that is disdainful of human life. It tells young boys growing up that they should acclimate themselves to sacrificing their mental and physical health for misguided notions of masculinity and in order to earn a living. The NFL is a sinister, retrograde enterprise that cannot go away soon enough if American men are to learn to value and respect each other and their own minds and bodies.