When watching the news about a month ago, the first thing that was broadcasted was how the Chicago Bears had lost to the St. Louis Rams. This particular broadcast lasted twenty minutes, and included brief interviews with the players, the coaches, and die-hard fans. This very emotional broadcast made it seem as if the world would end, just because the Bears lost a game, even though they will still get paid their fortune.
After this show of emotion was displayed, there were broadcasts of two kidnapped toddlers, an elderly couple who died in a fire, and a teenager who committed suicide by crashing an airplane into a building in Florida. What impertinence! When a news station does something like this, they are giving a message that a football game is more important than human lives. This course of action is an insult to said victims and their families. It is unmistakable that the media promotes selfishness and apathy of all sorts in ways like this. Why do they do this? For profit! During the Superbowl, top corporations are making millions in profit, because of their marketing techniques. Here's how it works: those in charge of marketing know that just about everyone will be watching television on Superbowl Sunday, because it is the last day of the football season. Knowing that they will be able to reach more potential customers, they post their commercials on this particular day. Similarly, virtually all news stations are funded by top corporations, and thus are forced to bend to their will. Therefore, a certain corporation can actually decide what can or cannot be broadcasted, and when it should be broadcasted. Thanks to Big Business and the media, Americans are thoroughly being brainwashed to the point of apathy. They are no longer giving us "news we can use," but by not taking a stand, we are giving them "money to burn."
High schools and universities are initially considered institutions for obtaining academic excellence. Many institutions are also strong believers in the importance of prestige. While some schools thrive to maintain academic prestige, others thrive to maintain athletic prestige. Such schools are my former high school. At least four times a year after chapel, the coaches and administrators would hold assemblies to praise the accomplishments of the football or basketball teams. When the school planned to add a new wing to the school building, the football players were given silver shovels in the groundbreaking ceremony. This honor was not rewarded to the newspaper staff, the student council, or even the honor society, and these are the societies that really spin the schools pendulum; they are the ones who make the decisions for the student body, prepare activities for the student body, provide them information, and provide the school with the academic prestige that it needed, and they are simply overlooked for the football team.
When such discrimination occurs, children and teenagers receive the message that the only way one can succeed in life is through athletics- a rather ironic message from an "educational environment." When one really thinks about it, the most important things needed to survive in life do not interact in any way with sports, and sports cannot truly be considered a professional career.
Sports do not require any amount of education, and can only take a person so far in comparison to other careers. For instance, if a writer loses his or her legs, sight or even speech, if his or her brain is still intact, he or she can still write. A writer could actually write until the day he or she dies The same thing applies for lawyers, doctors, and even teachers. If a professional football player acquires a serious foot injury or if he loses his leg, his career is over. Then what will he do?
Do not get me wrong; I am not against sports in general. What I am against is using sports as a controlled substance. By this reasoning, sports are like caffeine. When we drink coffee moderately and just for pleasure, coffee is a good thing. However, when we let sports interfere with our lives and our society, sport can become (and are) a huge problem, especially when we consider sports a profession, and we make the "sports professionals" rich. In the grand scheme of things, if people were paid what they were worth, a real professional ( teachers, social workers, doctors) would live in a mansion, while a professional football player would live in a Cabrini Green project.