Thursday, July 11, 2019

USA! USA!

We've all been following the USWNT as they dominated the Women's World Cup recently.  From their less than classy demolishing of Thailand and the over the top goal celebrations, to their ultimate triumph against The Netherlands.

But what's gotten the most attention is the non soccer stuff.

The "equal pay" discussion has been dealt with many places (the women get 13% of World Cup revenues, the men get 9%), especially when Rapino made it clear that if people spent more money, they players would get paid more.

The "we hate Trump" facet has also been covered plenty. 

What I've been thinking about is the peer pressure/bullying aspect.  

For example, one of the best defenders in the entire world was left off of the team.   We don't know why, but could her strong Christian faith and refusal to wear a particular jersey be part of the reason?

We really have absolutely no idea where the team (outside of Rapinoe) stands on visiting the White House.  Could that be because one really loud and vocal member of the team has spoken for everyone else?  

I find it interesting that we now not only protect certain classes of people, we give some of those protected classes a license to pretty much do anything they want without fear of consequences.

It seems statistically unlikely that everyone involved with the USWNT is in political lockstep.  It seems statistically likely that there are some people who understand that being invited to the White House is an honor and would like to have that experience regardless of their feelings about a particular president.   (I've heard from members of an athletic team that they chose to go as a group and decided to be mature enough to put politics aside for one day, so I know it's possible.)

This looks like a case of the loudest and most forceful voice simply drowning out any disagreement to selfishly make a political point.

3 comments:

Stan said...

It is my opinion that the loudest and most forceful voices are 1) typically a minority and 2) often drive the public opinion in a direction it would not have gone by their volume and forcefulness. In this topic and many others.

Craig said...

I agree. I think the fact that those voices are protected from any criticism, no matter how legitimate, means that they don't have to to right, factual, or supported by evidence, they just have to be loud and persistent.

We used to talk about ideas competing and the best ones would win, but now the whole idea of competition between ideas has been eliminated.

Craig said...

This is the text of a video, that was deleted from social media.

“Hide your kids, hide your wives, lock your f**kin door's because I got the key too the muthaf**kin city and I'm comin for all yo f**kin b**Deleted video of Drunk, belligerent, soccer player's

Hide your kids, hide your wives, lock your f**kin door's because I got the key too the muthaf**kin city and I'm comin for all yo f**kin b**ches.

Real role models huh?