No worries and it was not specifically directed to you. This is a subject that fills me with a lot of sadness because it’s easy to downplay it for other reasons or causes. Everything is so polarized today that it automatically becomes a “race issue” or “your cause here” when it could be something far more complex.
I could tell you a lot of stories about vets who flipped and some did not even have the incidents documented but you hear about it from their comrades. It’s sad and there is a lot of debate about it.
In WWI and even in WWII there were soldiers who had the crap shelled out of them that just started walking away from the battlefield who were executed as deserters. Like everything I am sure some of them were “cowards” but you also wonder when you read the stories about the ones who barely reacted or interacted with the investigating officers if they were wounded in the brain.
They would have been better off had they been bleeding from every orifice but they were tried, convicted, and executed immediately.
People break in the head all the time for a variety of causes and we write it off to things we can rationalize. I do it too but the older I get the more I believe the evil we see may be far more complex than we know and its easier to just not think about it.
I’m reading a book about WWI - what a useless tragedy that was. It seems as though it could have been prevented. (And now those Germans are forcing globalism on the rest of the world. They never give up, do they?)
A lot of sports-related head injuries are certainly preventable. This is why I snark about school athletics. Education and pitting young people - whose bones are not yet fully developed - against each other in contests where they literally crack their skulls together on purpose don’t go together, or shouldn’t. If your kid’s only hope in getting to college is that he’s willing get out there and bash his skull against another kid’s skull until they both have brain damage, then college is not going to do him any good and the students who are there just to learn are being shortchanged, at the very least.
Let’s face it: The NFL is junk. It’s going to be picked apart by angry families (who didn’t have a problem with putting their kid into school athletics and encouraging him to be as aggressive as possible) saying that they didn’t realize their family member was being harmed in his job that pays him a million dollars a season and they haven’t been enriched enough by this activity so they’re going to gouge.
‘Everything is so polarized today that it automatically becomes a “race issue” or “your cause here” when it could be something far more complex.’
You certainly got that right.
However, I really doubt if the speed freaks currently victimizing my neighborhood are all military vets suffering from CTE. Maybe one or two of them - but most are simply criminals, deserving of only a scant amount of sympathy. It was them I was mostly thinking about. If the constant babbling, shrieking, stalking, and threats are in fact a cry for help, I must frankly admit that whatever sympathy I have for that individual will be expressed in a very basic way.