Recovery continues from Covid.  Paxlovid, the anti-viral med seems to be working.  Thus far I am able to read and to write.  I could be much worse off.  I feel gratitude.

This is a segment from this morning’s New York Times concerning the collapse and cardiac arrest of Buffalo Bill’s Damar Hamlin on Monday night.  After a hit, Hamlin’s heart stopped beating.  He received CPR for ten minutes on the field.  He remains in the ICU recovering.

A moneymaker

The N.F.L. often seems mired in turmoil yet impervious to it. In recent years, it has confronted accusations of racial discrimination by Black coaches, allegations of workplace misconduct at a flagship franchise and posthumous diagnoses in more than 300 former players of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is associated with repeated blows to the head. Yet the league remains on track to meet Commissioner Roger Goodell’s goal of earning $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027.

Even this week, as the N.F.L. faces one of its worst crises in decades, it is also preparing for the next slate of games this weekend, which is going ahead as scheduled. Players and coaches have jobs to do. The N.F.L.’s business depends on it.

The simple fact of where Hamlin collapsed is a reminder of how quickly we move on from the startling violence in America’s most popular sports league. On the same field just three months ago, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was taken off on a stretcher after his head was slammed against the turf. He missed the next two games with a concussion. Days before, he had sustained another head hit. Then, in a Christmas Day game against the Green Bay Packers, he suffered another brain injury.

About five years ago on the same field, Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier suffered a spinal injury while making a tackle that not only ended his career but required him to learn to walk again. Unlike the game on Monday night, that one continued after a delay.

-excerpt The New York Times, The Morning by By Jenny Vrentas

If you desire, you may read the entire article, CLICK HERE

By any definition football is a blood sport.

Make no mistake though, the real game that all of us must play is that of capitalism.  Capitalism is an ideology, a theory of organizing the world, to extract more profit, because there is never enough…  Of course there are winners and losers, predator and prey, victors and vanquished.

Things can be different.  What is to be done?

Join with your neighbors and pray?

Surely you’ve got to be kidding!

Thoughts anyone?

---

I suggest this tune for our journey today.  It is well known as you and I have heard it played countless times over the airwaves.  Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney & Wings.

The beauty of the audio and visuals is a stark relief to the grim truth of the lyric message.

Live And Let Die

By Paul McCartney & Wings

When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
(you know you did, you know you did you know you did)
But if this ever changing world in which we’re living
Makes you give in and cry

Say live and let die
Live and let die
Live and let die
Live and let die

What does it matter to ya
When you got a job to do
You gotta do it well
You gotta give the other fellow hell

When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
(you know you did, you know you did you know you did)
But if this ever changing world in which we’re living
Makes you give in and cry

Say live and let die
Live and let die
Live and let die
Live and let die