Philly sports fans: where has your self-respect gone?

The Philadelphia I have known all my life has been a tough, demanding sports town. Sometimes too tough. We have been known to alienate some of our stars for nitpicking minutia, and taking successful players and coaches for granted. But it came from a good place, and in my opinion, an important place. The incessant desire to win and a demand for greatness. It puts pressure on ownership to not get complacent. Philly would always let their teams know when they weren't holding up their end of the bargain. Andy Reid and the Eagles made it to 4 straight NFC Championship Games, and one Super Bowl, but because they didn't win it all, the fans didn't take their foot off the pedal. They demanded better, even though most NFL fan bases would have killed to be in the position of the Eagles fans.

However, something has changed lately. I don't know if generations of sports fans have changed or there's something new added to Philly's water supply, but ever since the Eagles won the Super Bowl, Philly sports fans have gotten complacent. Maybe more saddening, is this city has lost their collective self-respect.

The Phillies haven't made the playoffs in a decade. Ten. Fucking. Years. And all it took was keeping the status quo by retaining JT Realmuto, Didi Gregorius, and adding a couple bullpen arms for the fans to get fat and satisfied. "This year is going to be different!" fans said. "I think under year two of Joe Girardi, they will find the groove and make the postseason!" Fans were dreaming playoffs and thinking big this season and ready to fill John Middleton's pockets with their cash, for as much as one can do during a pandemic. And what changed? Nothing, really. Fans were enthusiastic about a status quo that had already been proven over a 10 year period wasn't good enough. In years past, we would have never given a free pass to a team that hadn't won anything in a decade and made them prove to us they'd changed before buying in.

What happened to the demanding Philly sports fan that would call out their teams when they didn't do enough? This Phillies team's current playoff drought is approaching that of 1993-2007 in length and fans cut them more slack than they did Andy Reid's Eagles who made 4 NFC title games.

Now,  the Eagles. Coming off one of the most boring, unwatchable, unexciting seasons, with the most bland and unimaginative offense you'll ever see, the Eagles were sitting pretty at pick 6 with the potential opportunity to draft two generational pass-catching offensive talents. Guys who would entertain this city for years, and make game days fun again. Instead, Howie Roseman decided to trade down to pick 12 to acquire more draft capital, as a trade-off for a lesser player. And fans ate it right up. Because of course they did. Since winning the Super Bowl, the Eagles can do no wrong. Howie Roseman can run the team into the ground, Jeff Lurie can meddle and make absurd excuses for Howie during zoom conferences, and the fans will still talk themselves into being excited over lesser players than they could've gotten at their original draft spot. Ja'Marr Chase or Kyle Pitts? Bah, it's cool, we can settle for a Jaylen Waddle fans say with a teethy grin, almost as if they smile large enough they may actually convince themselves they're legitimately excited.

Something similar is happening in the video game industry. I've played video games my whole life. In the last year of video games, any fellow gamer would know we've seen our fair share of broken games at launch. If you don't play video games, that doesn't mean it in the physical sense, it means that the games didn't work right at their initial release date. Full of bugs and glitches. Games crashing. They weren't released in proper working condition. But video game fans made excuses for the game developers. Because their allegiance to their favorite developers and publishers superseded their self-respect, and the right to have a working product that they paid for. And the reason this issue of broken games continues to happen is because fans continue to pay money to these companies over and over again so they have no incentive to improve their work. Stop giving them money and they'd get the message that this state of gaming is unacceptable.

We're seeing the same thing in Philly sports. The Phillies can give the fans a mediocre baseball team for the nth straight year, yet fans continue to shovel money into Middleton's pockets. The Eagles continue to let Howie Roseman screw things up, pass on elite talents to prove to the world how smart he is. And Fans continue to throw their money at Jeff Lurie like a kid at an arcade. All the while, no improvement is being made. They shuffle the deck chairs of the Titanic a few times now and again, but the end result remains roughly the same over the last few years. When are you going to put your foot down and say "Enough, I'm tired of being treated this way"? When are you going to feel like you deserve better and start demanding it again? The Dodgers and Padres, two elite teams already, are adding new high-level talents from outside their organizations, but Phillies fans are over the moon just keeping their own. Howie Roseman is now at the point where he's being openly mocked by the mainstream sports media, which hardly ever happens with general managers because relationships need to be maintained. Yet Howie stays on, despite a catastrophic 3 year stretch, and fans have relegated themselves into getting excited about lesser players in a draft, and signing middle tier free agents they had to settle for because it's all they could afford after years of destroying their salary cap.

This is one of the premiere sports towns in the country. A top 5 market. This isn't Little Rock fucking Arkansas. Get some fucking self-respect and stop giving these teams the light of day until they start doing what needs to be done. I never thought I'd long for the days of hearing fans trash Andy Reid after his first loss following a 6 game winning streak, but I do. At least those fans held their teams accountable when they needed to. You saw Josh Harris reverse course on a decision to cut employee salaries during a pandemic because of mere public pressure. You, the fan, has more power than you realize. Start using it. Get your dignity back, Philadelphia.

Is human life special?

I've been thinking a lot about existentialism lately and the purpose of human life. Particularly after I listened to Sam Harris' recent podcast episode about free will, which is definitely worth checking out. I started thinking about the vastness of the universe and though I don't believe it's likely we are the only intelligent life in existence; if we were, what would it say about the human species? It has to mean that if true, it makes us all the more special, right? I think the answer depends on how you look at things.

You can make the case that if us humans on earth are the only forms of advanced life in an entire universe that has trillions of galaxies and trillions of planets within each galaxy, that it would make us so incredibly rare, that it would be impossible to argue that we weren't special. And that is a very valid point, where if someone believed that I couldn't possibly say they were wrong. In fact, I might believe it myself. However, let's view things from a different perspective and see if I can maybe provide an alternative take on just how extraordinary human life is.

Yes, human beings are unique. We are capable of incredible things. The pyramids, skyscrapers, governments, currencies, nuclear weapons, vaccines, leaving our own planet and landing our own on the moon, landing rovers on Mars. Throughout our history, humans have achieved unbelievable things. Yet, we aren't alone in this when it comes to the extraordinary. Supergiant stars, black holes, quesars, magnetars are all capable of insane things. The fact that the gravitational pull of a black hole is so powerful that not even light itself can escape. Light. The thing we take for granted every single day, so much so, we don't take the time to stop and think of what it actually is. In the vast star ocean we call space, something so infinitely big will always have something discovered that is unique and amazing. Scientists discover them all the time. Just because they may not have a mechanism called a brain, doesn't make them any less incredible.

Some might argue that one day, if our species lives long enough, humans might change the universe as we know it. Turn it into an intergalactic haven for life. Travel between galaxies, establish trade not between countries, but between planets. The ability to extend life to virtually endless horizons. And yet, the universe is changing all the time even without us. Galaxies collide and destroy one another. Stars explode and wipe out everything remotely close to them when they supernova. A giant meteor could take earth out tomorrow and every human along with it. And the universe would continue along without batting an eye like we never existed.

Everything we know of in the universe is matter: made up of atoms, and quantum particles. We all have that in common. After all, atoms in our bodies came from exploding stars at one part in our universe's history. All matter, whether it's protons, electrons, photons, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, planets, stars, or anything in between all exist to perform a certain task. The universe exists unto itself, it doesn't care what those tasks are, but we all have our own role to play nonetheless. What we accomplish as humans is meaningless to the universe. We can't stop the universe or destroy it. We can't grow it our shrink it. We exist within it like all other matter. What makes us more special in our role than the role of a star or a black hole or a comet?

Our roles as human beings comes almost entirely from an evolutionary and biological nature. We need to think highly of our capabilities and our accomplishments, otherwise we'd never have the motivation to advance as a species. We need to feel like our advancements are contributing and mean something in the grand scale of the universe. But are our accomplishments any more important or significant than say that of quantum particles? Particles are performing tasks every fraction of a second 24 hours a day all around us and within us. We wouldn't exist without these particles. Nothing would. They're performing a task they are designed to do, making up everything that we observe in the universe. Just because we can't see it happening with our naked eye, doesn't mean it isn't important. When we achieve something considered groundbreaking, like landing on the moon, we all applaud ourselves and high five each other. As we should. Accomplishments like that are objectively impressive. However, we do this in the context of ourselves. We find what we do important. No one else does. No animal or insect cares about these things. They don't even know they're happening. There are no stars or planets or comets out there applauding us. They don't care. Nor does the universe. It exists irrespective of how we act or live our lives.

So in the end, just how special or unique is the human species? Are we possibly one form of intelligent life in an unfathomably massive space? Or are we one entity among an infinitely large number of entities that all perform specific tasks within a universe, that couldn't care one bit about who we are and what we've done? I think you can make the case for either. I'm not sure what I believe, but I wanted to share both perspectives to give you something to think about.

2020's social justice movement has backfired, as things in America have gotten objectively worse for minorities

 It's one thing to identify a problem in this world. It's another thing to identify how to solve that problem. 2020's social justice reckoning brought about an important landmark in America, but how it will be remembered will depend entirely on the solutions and reactions to those problems.

Since mid 2020, the US has seen both homicide rates and hate crimes rise exponentially. If it is true that the sanctity of human life is our most precious treasure, then it's impossible to argue that life in America for minorities has not gotten objectively worse. Most of these crimes are taking place in major cities, where the majority of people of color in America reside. In 2020, you saw homicides in America rise from 2019 by over 35% according to recent analysis. Individually some cities' rate, both large and small, rose by over 100%. In 2021, homicide rates continue to increase in many cities. In Philadelphia for instance, homicides rose to 500 in 2020, up from 356 the year before. As of a few weeks ago, 2021 is on pace for close to 700 murders. We're talking 1990's level violence in some major cities.

Since defunding the police, Portland's homicides are up roughly a whopping 2,000%. Is that entirely due to merely defunding the police or a coincidence? I'll get into that shortly. Many of the lives lost in these major cities are black lives. Many of them children, even. If the goal of social justice is to protect life, and therefore, prevent death, then we have failed, as have our solutions to this problem.

The question is why have they failed? In part, I believe because a lot of proposed solutions came from a place of emotion and not logic. People were angry, sad, hurt, and were not in a place psychologically to think of rational solutions to the problems of racial injustice in America. Solutions proposed were to strip away the funding from police departments, who, very often, are the only entities equipped to protect minority neighborhoods. Especially ones gang and drug ridden. The argument was that "we'd only be taking away some money to invest it into communities and help in other areas, and wouldn't affect the departments' ability to do their jobs." And how has that worked out? Already, several cities are rushing to pass legislation to increase funding, as there are a shortage of officers in some communities, that are now ill-equipped to be protected. Many officers have resigned and/or retired due to the lack of backing from their city and state leaders. And some, like Michael Brown's father, have questioned how donations to Black Lives Matter are being used.

Anyone who thought logically about the drawbacks of defunding the police departments could have seen this coming. I wrote about this several times. I'm no expert, though I do spend a lot of time reading and blogging about crime. All I did was think rationally, take the emotions of an incredibly emotional situation out of it, and realized that this was going to backfire. For minority communities most of all. In fairness, I do believe that some of the homicide spikes in were due to 2020 COVID lockdown frustrations, but not as many as originally assumed by some. As homicides spike even more in 2021, and America is more open than it was in 2020, that no longer stands up well to scrutiny.

Another area we have failed, was the allowance of Critical Race Theory rhetoric to permeate our culture and institutions the way it has in recent years. Not just with with homicides, but with hate crimes as well. Just recently, after a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, The Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) released multiple statements condemning Critical Race Theory for the poison that it is, knowing full well its potential for harm. Some of whom see very familiar Maoist ties in its rhetoric, and "struggle sessions" often pushed by institutions who adopt CRT. Hate crimes in 16 of America's largest cities rose by 145% in 2020. We'll see where the 2021 stand once the year ends, but there appears, at least on the surface, to be a substantial amount to start the new year.

Yes, some of this is linked directly to COVID. Just like after September 11th, hate crimes rose against Muslim Americans in the US, it stands to reason(unfortunately) that after COVID hate crimes against Asians are going to rise. However, not every perpetrator is what many would refer to as a "Trumper." Many of them haven't been. Most of these are coming in Democratic cities with people of all races committing these crimes. I think it's a variety of factors, but Critical Race Theory propaganda ties in directly as well. In recent years, Asians have been discriminated against, for being very good earners in America, and being very well represented in prestigious universities as a demographic. Some publications have start lumping in Asian Americans with white people, in certain race-based studies. A tech company advertised a job that was only open to "non-Asians." A San Francisco school board member accused Asians of using "white supremacy to get ahead." And the term "Yellow Privilege" was used as an adjacent to the term "White Privilege" as a way to demean individual Asians, and infer that they have protections under criminal law. As if there isn't more to an entire race of people and their accomplishments than one tiny slice to analyze. Notice the terms "oppressor" and "oppressed" in the attached photo, both staples of CRT.

Critical Race Theory teaches us that only two types of people in the world exist: the oppressors and the oppressed. That we must view every situation race-first. That racism is the single defining factor in every major societal, government, or corporate decision. That racism is incurable. That minorities in America can't succeed on their own, and need white Americans to ally with them, while simultaneously also saying that white people are irreparably racist, are born racist, and are solely the cause of every racist policy in America. CRT is both hypocritical and regressive. It's both racist, and sophistry. It's no wonder hate crimes and homicides are rising. The ability to relate to one another and see each other as human beings is being eroded. Instead, we blame and point fingers. We ridicule and demonize. We strip down each individual's complex identity down strictly to their immutable characteristics. Recent surveys have shown the unwillingness to speak or interact with others is rising. How are we supposed to have complex conversations and understand one another if we are afraid to speak to one another or when one side already has decided the other is wrong about any given issue? How can society come together to cure racism if it's taught society is irreparably corrupt and racism exists in everything aspect of it? What would be the point in even trying if that's what you were led to believe?

What has spawned is resentfulness, anger, and the increased likelihood to treat someone as subhuman, whether it's killing them or committing hate crimes against them. This will come true if you view them less as an actual person with complex beliefs and ideas, or are taught that person you don't even know either hates you or has wronged you just by existing. It's going to be much easier to feel helpless and resort to desperate acts, including violence, if you believe you never have any chance of making something of yourself regardless of how hard you work. And over time, the racial divide from this rhetoric will continue to grow as certain communities grow bitter and resentful, as any injustice committed by one ethnicity against another will be affirmation of any ignorant belief that one ethnicity is out to destroy the other. There are a lot of areas where society has fallen short, but we'll never find solutions to those problems if we cannot get along with one another. As some institutions, particularly universities, where our young adults go to grow and learn; have started to adopt segregation-based policies under the influence of CRT, that feels less and less likely everyday.

So, what is the solution? To start, our nation's biggest entities should stop listening to the vocal extreme activists, that's for damn sure. If they had it their way, Capitalism would be abolished for some form of Marxism, every person with money, no matter if self-earned, would have everything they own stripped away and be redistributed; police and prisons would be done away with; and race-based segregation would return to every aspect of society. The institutions that lead this country need to grow a backbone, and stop listening to vocal minority of social media mobs who have no idea how anything in society actually works. Most importantly, people need to get together and have discussions on how to solve complex issues and be okay with disagreement. We need to use logic and sound rationale instead of our emotions on how to fix what is damaged. We need to base decisions on research and data, not feelings. We need to not over-correct on things that may only be partially broken, where minor tweaks could make a much more positive impact than wholesale changes, because often those over-corrections bring about more problems than originally existed. Like defunding the police and stunting their ability to protect its citizens; or corporations hiring diversity, equity, and inclusion directors who implement struggle sessions in the workplace where you get openly shamed based on your skin color, like Jodi Shaw experienced at Smith College. Then maybe, someday, we can see real social justice in America, instead of just preaching about it.