When I made the decision in August to give up college football, I also decided to throw in the NFL as well. So, just I have not been paying attention to college football, I have equally not been paying attention to the NFL. I didn't even know that the NFL referees had been locked out until I happened, while reading about other sports, to see a story about it heading into the first week of the NFL season.
Meanwhile, while I wasn't watching, many who have been watching have apparently voiced their discontent following the game this past Monday, using, as Michael Butterworth has noted, the language of armageddon.
Frankly, I don't care a whole heck of a lot about "botched" or otherwise controversial calls. I suppose it's good that fans have voiced their outrage, but I'm happy that I wasn't even watching in the first place. Remember -- the NFL locked out its referees; the referees did not strike. And then, while locking out the referees, the NFL hired replacements ...
This does, I think, as Butterworth suggests, offer "a glimpse into our eschatological future." And I think it's telling about our present and potentially that future that the articulation of discontent came now and not when the NFL locked out the referees. It's telling because it reflects the worrisome disregard for the place of labor in the United States and the troubling adherence to the corporate organizational structure that has become so entrenched in U.S. society. When are folks upset? Apparently only when the product they want suffers, not when the folks who make that product do.
The NFL is a high-stakes corporation, and it seems to have all of the oppressive side effects of such an organization. In other words, I don't regret giving it up at all ...
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