Cancel the Football Games Already This Weekend...

I think this is why they are allowing Hamlin to linger... the NFL does not want to admit, should he pass in the coming days, that what we witnessed on the field was not a midgame collapse so much, but a midgame death...

We saw the hit, we saw the fall, we saw what happened.  The medical care is wonderful, a family can have closure and know that everything medically possible was done.  But family members are even saying now:  Damar Hamlin died on the playing field that night, before he was revived, not once but twice...

The 24-year-old Hamlin was still in critical condition in the intensive care of a Cincinnati hospital on Tuesday after making a tackle, standing up and then crumbling to the ground during Buffalo’s marquee game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Medical personnel appeared to perform CPR on him for several minutes before he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He was in cardiac arrest, according to the team, and his heartbeat was restored on-site. 

The dramatic scene involving Hamlin played out not just on national television, but also directly in front of players from both teams who watched a peer receive emergency treatment in a life-or-death situation, seconds after he had been doing what every one of them also does for a living. Those on the field were visibly shaken by what they saw, with some in tears. Players on opposing teams embraced and Bills players gathered, kneeling in a prayer circle. 

America is just not ready to accept the truth about our homegrown fun and games. Our national pasttime.  And now, even the best of the universities are too intertwined to admit what they have become:  MOO U's, as Jane Smiley put it.   A place where the sport of football is too intertwined with money and politics (see Donna Shalala's career) to ever think of losing the sport cash cow and going back primarily to the business of academics, educating students...

What the NFL does now will be telling if Damar "dies" and the league proceeds with business as usual.  I don't see how they can keep him on life support until the Super Bowl, if indeed, his soul has passed and it is only his body getting the best medical treatment available now...

Pray to God my instincts are proven wrong, but I think this young man sacrificed himself in a deadly sport, and we can't really deny anymore what is happening to so many others, like him, in the name of profit.  

Wouldn't it be something if the drive for workers' rights, if the ability to stand up for our working-class brothers and sisters whose health and well-being are being sacrificed for corporate shareholder profits, begins with the refusal to ... "play on" by our "elite, overpaid" athletes who are putting it all on the line while they work?

This really isn't a sport anymore; it's akin to baiting and hunting from tree stands.  And it's definitely not your grandfather's game.