Please, please, please NFL. Stop making me hate you. Let me
go back to loving Sundays. Please. It doesn’t seem like it’s really all that
hard. Wrong
is wrong. Just because our parents or grandparents did things a certain way
doesn’t make it right. Follow the “good enough for my parents” argument to its
conclusion and you’ll justify slavery. You’ll be cool with polygamy. You’ll be
the ape with a lethal leg bone in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” My mother once
“spanked” me with a shoe. We weren’t living down South when that happened so I
don’t think you can write that off as a “cultural norm.” I don’t remember
what childhood crime I committed that caused my mother to levy this judgment on
me. I was three years old. I don’t remember all that much of my third year on
the planet. I didn’t learn to swear till much later in life (thanks Uncle Ross)
but maybe I was inadvertently blasphemous. Maybe I repeated something I heard
my cousin David say. I thought my cousin David was the coolest when I was a
kid. I would’ve repeated anything he said as gospel cool. Like the fact our Uncle Phil was a “douchebag” (whatever that was). Or maybe I spilled my juice.
Whatever it was I did, when I periodically take stock of who I am today and
what I’ve accomplished in my life, I have never thought, “Thank Christ Mom hit
me with that shoe. Phew! Who knows where I’d be today if she hadn’t?”
Then again, complexity theory says I could blame mom for everything that happened after she hit me with
that shoe.
It’s tempting.
It’s always tempting to blame someone else for our actions.
