Because we jumped the gun on ‘getting back to normal,” we’ve put ourselves and sports at greater risk.
I wonder if the word “humanity” has real meaning these days. That’s a terrifying thing to assert, but, unfortunately, we see issues right before our eyes. Too many Americans didn’t listen to officials who said to take this pandemic seriously. So, now, our country is in worse shape than it was just a few weeks ago. There’s only one word to describe it: Impatience!
Just because we saw the curve getting flatter and witnessed political leaders without masks, we concluded that things are fine and that the pandemic is over. Life can go back to normal. Well, it hasn’t, and it isn’t. So, now, impatient America gets the very thing that it wanted to avoid — the virus hanging around much longer than it should.
That impatience extends to sports. I joined Frank Fear and Bill Rizzo on a podcast recently talking about this very topic. We spoke at length about the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on sports. We concluded that we don’t have confidence in professional and college sports being able to come back safely this year. Throw high school and youth sports into that mix, too.
Sports should NOT be played this year. What’s more, sports should be sidelined until we have a much better grasp of COVID-19 and a vaccine to protect the population. Human life is nothing to toy around with or use as an experiment.
Mind you. We want sports back! But impatient America has made that prospect less possible than before.
If we could have just waited longer to reopen the country, then this country would be in much better shape. Instead, sports leagues are pushing the schedule. Both the NBA and MLB will be back in a matter of weeks. I ask: For what? We’ve lived without sports for three months, can’t we manage a few more? No! The leagues can’t. We can’t.
It’s impatience! Since the advent of rapid technology, we’ve become increasingly impatient. We want everything right now–news, sports, food, our Uber service…it’s a long list. Even our conversations have turned into an emoji. Text messages have incomplete sentences, and we abbreviate just about every word in the dictionary.
It makes no sense for us to act this way.
As a country, we’ve faced other crises over the years–a civil war that killed over 1,200,000 Americans, a flu pandemic that killed another 675,000 Americans, and two world wars that took the lives of nearly 1,500,000 Americans. So it’s no exaggeration to say that this country has faced things far worse than COVID-19 … and that we’ve overcome those things.
But to overcome crises, we need patience. Unfortunately, it’s running at a low level in America today. We just can’t wait to go to the bar, to get our games back on TV, to get back ‘to normal.’ Impatient, we need things NOW–not tomorrow–now. But in our urge to get our fix, we’ve forgotten a lesson learned in youth: patience is a virtue.
We’ve lost virtue. America. So it’s high time to do a reality check and regain virtue. To become ‘a people’ again, we need to get our priorities in order.
