I Don't Have Time For This Bowl Crap

At 3:00 p.m. today, the institution at which I received my Bachelor's degree and at which I am currently employed will take the field for a college football bowl game as the Bowling Green State University Falcons will play the San Jose State University Spartans in the Military Bowl.  In past years, I would have already written a little bit on this blog about this bowl game, as it likely would have been at the top or near the top of my ranking of the season's college football bowl games in terms of how much watching each appeals to me. Like in previous years, that ranking would have offered an honest assessment of my interest and would have been meant to provide a counternarrative to the lists on major sports news websites that are dominated by games featuring teams from leagues that have automatic qualification for the BCS bowl games -- you know, those lists that reflect a perspective that correlates in some ways to the sentiment of outrage that was articulated when Mid-American Conference member Northern Illinois earned an invitation to one of the BCS games this year.

This year, there was no list because ... well ... there is no appeal to watching any of the games.  After deciding in August to give up college football, I have not watched a single moment of any college football bowl games this year, and I have no plans to watch any of them.  Thus, I offer no list.

I had thought about going through each of the 35 college football games and demonstrating a reason for not watching each one by pointing to some way in which one or both institutions place football in too powerful of a position, by pointing out a practice at one or both institutions that demonstrates the troubling ramifications of how football programs are run and/or financed, or by pointing out a troubling ramification of the bowl game itself.  It was easy to start seeing and finding examples for many games, but frankly, I didn't want to write the post up and scout out a link to an example to provide for every game.  College football doesn't warrant that much of my time.

So, instead, I'll just reiterate that sentiment.  My alma mater is playing in a college football bowl game today.  It's a bowl game that is problematic as a bowl game for some of its ramifications, as Michael Butterworth and Stormi Moskal have pointed out.  It's also featuring, in my alma mater, an institution that, amid a climate of concerns about rising tuition, already has its students on the hook for $50 a semester in a student fee to pay for the basketball arena that opened in 2011, yet, as reported in the Toledo Blade, members of the Board of Trustees for this institution attended a football game at the University of Akron this fall to "gain ideas for a renovation of Doyt Perry Stadium."

Yeah ... college football definitely doesn't warrant any more of my time.

Serving Up Christmas

I am not a Christian.  I do not belong or adhere to any particular set of religious beliefs.  Rather, as I have written on this blog, I found spiritual peace when I came to the conclusion that I neither believe nor disbelieve in God (or, for that matter, any particular religious perspective).  So, Christmas does not have particular meaning for me as a celebration of the birth of the son of God and the various significances that go with that.  Still, there would seem to be much of worth in the philosophies associated with Jesus, and so, as I have been contemplating that this year, I have come to the view that celebrating Christmas as a means of commemorating and reflecting upon those philosophies may have value.  That value, though, would seem to call for celebration of Christmas in a very different way than how so many of us currently celebrate it, and for that I'd like to contextualize it within other views of holidays that I have developed in recent years.

As I have indicated on this blog, I think we should rearrange some of the meanings we currently associate with winter holidays.  Thanksgiving should be removed, as it and its mythology of oppression have little meaning, or it should be changed to a National Day of Mourning.  I think the day of thanks that many now observe on Thanksgiving should be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  A day celebrating those who have worked and sacrificed in the name of civil rights seems much more appropriate as a time at which to be thankful.  The day of giving gifts that we now celebrate on Christmas should be moved to New Year's Eve/Day. The time when we both look back at the past year and look forward to the next year seems like the appropriate time for gift giving and merriness.

Christmas, then, in this reconfiguration, would take over for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a day of service.  There certainly are good reasons to associate Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights with the theme of service, so it's not that I'm opposed to that connection (though there may be some problematic racial coding occurring when the concept of "service" is associated with the holiday that is most prominently associated with the contributions of racial and ethnic minorities).  It seems, though, that that holiday is much more appropriately themed as a time of thanks.  Meanwhile, the messages offered by Jesus seem to align so squarely with the concept of service and seem to have their most use to both Christians and non-Christians as they are associated with service that I think, at least insofar as we might wish to maintain Christmas as a holiday, we ought to make it the day of service.

With that in mind, I am making plans this Christmas to increase my forms of service this coming year, and I resolve each Christmas Day and/or Eve going forward to spend a few hours volunteering in some form of service capacity.  That seems so much more deeply in line with my understandings of Jesus than anything else I might do that day.