Sunday, September 21, 2014

September 21st: The Last Grain

I’ve been fairly quiet about the Ray Rice situation in the last several weeks. Part of the reason is that I was waiting to see how other people reacted. Part of it is that I had a sneaky feeling more would be coming than just what we had originally learned.

All I knew was that, when Ray Rice was given a 2 game suspension for domestic violence against his soon-to-be wife, that wouldn’t be the end of the story. The NFL’s fan base and ESPN’s commentators were in an uproar, demanding an answer as to why the punishment was so lenient. It wasn’t until the video footage from inside the elevator came out that the NFL and the Ravens decided to take more drastic action, suspending Rice indefinitely and releasing him from the team, respectively.


The aftermath in the realm of social change has been enormous. The National Organization for Women (NOW) has demanded that Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, resign his job to make up for the judgement flaws coming out of his office. In fact, the clamor for Goodell’s head has been loud and enthusiastic.


I, on the other hand, am not going to call out the Ravens, the NFL, or Roger Goodell. While each of them is at fault, at least to some extent, the root of the issue goes to a much larger problem: the United States justice system.


Roger Goodell, you see, has made a habit of waiting until the law determines a player or owner’s punishment before levying one of his own. Therefore, when the legal system let Ray off with just a slap on the wrist and a court-mandated anger management class, Goodell took that to mean things were going to be ok.


Yet the public has all but let this go unnoticed. Only a select few have acknowledged that the failure on the part of the legal system is what set this problem in motion, leading to this debacle. We do, of course, also need to acknowledge that blame falls unilaterally on Ray Rice. While many people, institutions, and organizations have muddied the waters, if Rice had had control over his behavior and reactions, we could have avoided this whole situation all-together.


All of that being said, the public has made one heinous error that will cause the Ray Rice situation to go down as the worst thing to ever happen to the NFL, rather than an incredible opportunity for mankind. The situation has been made about Ray Rice. Everything has been about this one situation, what went wrong, and how we can punish this one man. Because we feel bad about what we saw in the video footage, we have ran this man out of town, ruined his career, attempted to decide the strength of his relationship (His now-wife has stood by him every step of the way), and generally turned him into a villain. In fact, we only really seemed upset when we actually saw the video. It wasn’t enough for Ray to tell us what he did. It was only when we saw the violence that we believed it to be really what it was.


I’ve never met Ray Rice. I know people who have, and everyone who knew him swears by his positive attitude, his sincerity, and his desire to be a good person. By all accounts I can find, Ray Rice is a good man who made a terrible mistake. His high school football coach, a beloved member of his community, threatened to quit his job if the high school did not return Rice’s jersey to the school’s rafters. He was that supportive of this man.


Here is the other piece of the puzzle. NOW has claimed that there is a domestic abuse issue in the NFL. Upon further review, though, 20 men have been charged with domestic abuse in the NFL in the past 4 years. Out of the 1,700 players in the NFL, that makes up just over 1%. While I’m sure only a fraction of those who are abusers actually face charges, there still is evidence that football does not experience any higher a rate of domestic abuse than any other industry. In fact, I would be willing to bet that in any group of 1,700 men in any industry, at least 20 will be abusive. This isn’t a good thing. It is a scary number. But it is representative of a much larger issue, not within the NFL, but within all walks of humanity.


By making this example a Ray Rice issue, we are failing to make it about all of the men and women who face abusive relationships in their lives. We are failing to actually help those people who cannot stand up for themselves. Focusing exclusively on Ray Rice will not make the problem go away. In fact, it may even lead to more women who are afraid of turning in their husbands and boyfriends for fear that, by ruining every facet of a person’s life, they will turn even more violent.


We, as a society, have the opportunity to teach humanity in this moment. We can teach men and women what a healthy relationship looks like, and in some cases what it doesn’t. We can teach how to learn from bad decisions and how to become better people when we mess up. We can teach how to take a bad situation and turn it into an opportunity for growth and learning. We have a choice, and right now, we are making the wrong one.

This is the second in my series of posts about causes that I will be making a donation to. I will be making a donation to a charity supporting those who have experienced domestic abuse. Hopefully a combination of advocacy and support will bring about a serious change for the better.

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