Ah, will the parade of criminals never end?
Yet another NFL player has been punished in the ongoing joke that is the NFL's policy on domestic violence. The list grows bigger, not as more players get caught, but as more victims come out with stories of how they told the league weeks and sometimes months in advance about violence and abuse, only to be ignored while the NFL rushed to hide the issue and keep their precious players on the field, making money for already wealthy team owners.
Nobody should be the least bit surprised by the problems coming to light. The NFL is a multimillion-dollar business that stops at nothing to make a dollar, as we learned in north Santa Clara, California, when the city and the league shoe-horned a stadium up the collective asses of local residents without mercy. Its a big deal when a billion dollar business loses revenue, and the NFL has no intention of letting that happen.
What should surprise you is the lack of neither a real policy against domestic violence nor any real punishment. In the last three years alone, there have been more that 50 player arrests for various crimes. Of all of the arrests, the average punishment was to suspend the player for one single game. You read that right. For the crimes they committed, players received an average of a one-game suspension. Being an average, that means that many of these guys got a zero-game suspension, with the league opting for some monetary punishment equating to pennies on the dollar for guys making millions per year.
The NFL is just another business in a series of American businesses that function on a schedule of corruption and greed, at the expense of human beings. Victims are minimized and shoved to the side, both by their attackers, and later by the league itself. The almighty dollar apparently screams much louder than a beaten woman or a whipped child.
Though this may come across as a sports issue, it is really a business issue. The need for corporations to maintain their bottom lines, even if it means that innocent people suffer around them, is unacceptable.
Whether your company is a financial organization in New York selling bad loans, an energy company ducking billions of dollars in punishment for a faulty gas line in San Bruno, California, or a sports organization that hides known criminals in its ranks to keep fans happy, profit should never prevent any corporation from doing what's right.
The NFL, in hiding its guilty players and allowing their innocent victims to suffer, is acting no differently than the Romans did, filling coliseums with rabid fans who wanted to see competition, regardless of whether human beings were being hurt or killed. Corporate leaders who trade human dignity for profit are like modern-day Neros.
Nobody should be surprised that money talks. But the pleasant surprise is the response by wealthy sponsors like Anheuser Busch, McDonald's and Radisson Inns, all of whom are feeling the pinch from revenue-generating people who are making their voices heard, albeit through the almighty dollar. Big corporations understand that money is "easy come, easy go." The NFL should take heed in this, and so should their fans.
... Because human dignity will never be more valuable than money. If we allow that to happen, than sadly, our society is more barbaric than I thought...