Emilio's Super Sunday Sermon

By NowPublic Contirutor Emilio Lizardo
Ann Arbor, February 1, 2009, 4:20PM EST

As anyone living in this sector of the galaxy already well knows, so I needn't mention it, but will anyway, merely for rhetorical purposes I would imagine, today is the day every true-blue American football fan has been waiting for the entire season, all year, maybe even their entire lifetime. For Buddhists, the wait for today's  Superbowl XLIII has possibly involved several lifetimes, even up to and including a short intermediate eon. Any takers for an entire Day of Brahma? Of course, the entire Day of Brahma option would apply only to those of Hindu persuasions. And yet, while most Hindus, being Indian citizens as a rule, happen nearly exclusively to be absolutely fanatical Cricket followers, the possibility still exists that a few may be American football fans as well, and so it may very well be true in those cases the excitement for them has indeed been building for billions and billions of years which happens to be roughly the duration of a single Day of Brahma, more or less.

I, for one must sadly admit I don't really know how all this works. I am not any kind of a football fan by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. I even had to look up who was playing today before I started writing this. Usually I find myself stabbing the remote's next-channel button almost immediately when, most often by the purest accident I do happen to land on a football game in progress. Personally, I'd almost always rather watch golf. But, that's how it goes in this amazing and mysterious world of ours - to each his own, one man's trash is another's treasure, etc, ad nauseum.

"Live and let live," is what I say. But, I digress ...

Never having been one to run with the herd, as it were, posting this article today, for me therefor made perfect sense. It may not make any sense to anyone else, but that's how it goes. "Sometimes you just have to roll the potato," as they say.

So, on this holiest-of-holy days of that most revered blood-sport of American football, wherein, by the way, the average length of a player's career is somewhere around three-and-a-half seasons, I cry out for a rebirth of reason and civility, as a mere distant and nearly infintesimal voice in the wilderness, I know, but compared to most of my past indiscretions, this is nothing for me to be concerned about, nothing, really, at all.

Instead of pointing out such obvious destructive effects a day like today undoubtedly will have on the minds of our nation's innocent young children, who will watch dad and his buddies guzzling beer perhaps even to excess, and maybe nowadays almost certainly in the company of their moms, all of them present in front of the electronic alter of today's wide-screen HD surround-sound wonder of modern technology, captivated by the extreme spectacle of the Steelers and the Cardinals committing upon each other's persons shocking acts of violence in their mutual and opposing utlimate strategic effort to win the Big Game, I will make an effort to say something nice for a change.

I know what all those little kids will be thinking as they watch the great spectacle themselves, even if they have to sneak around to do it, because you know that's how kids are. They'll be thinking, as they watch, possibly in secret over the shoulders of ther preoccupied parents and or gaurdians, "why do I have to go to my room for a whole hour of quiet-time when I only slap my little sister just a little bit, and these footballers get huge roars of approval from the crowd, not to mention dad, his buddies, and possibly mom as well, for almost killing each other?"

Well, maybe they won't be thinking exactly that, but it will probably be something close. They won't understand it at all that it's only OK for sports heroes to behave this way. They're only doing their jobs. It's just a game. The kids won't get it at all. You know as well as I do they won't get it. Talk about mixed-messages!

Moving right along now after obviously having digressed yet again, even though I was trying very hard this second time not to, I come now at long last to the point of my Super Sunday Sermon. It's a story about a quarrel between two old men who lived out in the desert a long, long time ago. The story goes like this -

I know! I know!  I can hear what you are saying at this point - "This is a story for kids. The real world does't work that way." And of course, my answer would be, "I suspect that you are correct."

And yet, having been my entire life an incorrigable kid at heart, and knowing to a certainty that by now it's far too late to change, I still would ask, "Why can't life be like that?"

"Who's stopping us?"

I can hear what you might be saying again, this time perhaps sadly to yourselves, and gently shaking your heads from side to side, "Sometimes kids just don't get it, do they?"