What a week. It began each morning, Monday through Friday, with a bowl of Cheerios and an investigation. The milk appears to be its typically chalky pigment, the story goes, but the sun still sleeps and the lights are off. There is no way to see for sure. I tug a dangling cord to my right and a soft orange escapes the lampshade. It’s enough to confirm the one percent’s pasteurized whiteness.
Next, the taste test. I dig a spoonful from deep within the bowl and raise it to my mouth. What is your sea, Cheerios? I take a final look and slurp — it is sweet. It is delicious. Its flavor is normal.
Richard Sherman has spared me.
I feel such sympathy for the ones who have been so immaturely abused by this tiny man on a television screen.
Sherman, who a week ago was a really good defensive back in the NFL and then became the most famous debate topic in America, has highlighted our societal best: that we care deeply about irrelevant crap. This football player, God love him, was excited last Sunday. He made a game-saving play to clinch the biggest win of the season for his team, and did so against an individual opponent who, we know today, rebuffed his postgame handshake. Immediately afterward, wired on adrenaline, he acted a braggart and yelled something G-rated but disparaging about his foe into a reporter’s microphone. It was silly television. It lasted all of 15 seconds.
I’m not a Richard Sherman guy. He has performed and behaved as the type of player who is excellent at his craft, is gratingly boastful about it, and can annoy the hell out of you. As anyone who follows sports would attest, he’s the professional athlete you’d relish to have on your team — and if he plays for any of the other 30, you can’t stand him. I say he’s ‘terrible’ as a fan. Lots of folks said so as culture hawks.
The Twitter racists who reacted to Sherman’s rant were expected company. They unfortunately are predictable, vile and hurtful cretins, and they would be undeserving of attention were it not for the cultural significance of their obscenities. But what started the nation on a weeklong conversation about the way some dude said something was a more modest and widespread word: ‘thug.’ (Ed: Though Sherman has doubts about how ‘modest’ this word is. It’s certainly misused.) Social media — the upper arm area we use to gauge blood pressure — determined, by some imprecise consensus, that Sherman’s shouts amounted to thuggish conduct.
It made people want to root for Sherman’s opponent next week, at least. At most, it prompted fans and alums to hop on the Stanford football team’s Facebook page — Stanford is Sherman’s alma mater — and say that they were “ashamed” or “embarrassed” to be associated with his antics. The page posted a message congratulating all of the Stanford alumni, including Sherman, who will participate in the Big Game Feb. 2. One person wrote that he was “very sorry” the team would honor Sherman like this. Another advised the administrator to “take the post down.”
“… now I am rethinking my season tickets.”
You betcha. Heck, return your diploma. Your Cheerios probably weren’t the only thing Sherman let loose on.
When the Twitter-Facebook continuum said emphatically that Richard Sherman committed a crime against good taste and comported himself like a dummy, we were doomed. Doomed to defensive comments that never should’ve needed to be made — that he “maintained a 3.9 GPA,” or that he “graduated with a degree in Communications from Stanford University.” Doomed to articles that never should’ve needed to be written, being told that “it’s hypocritical to rip [the] Seahawks’ Richard Sherman for rant,” and that the “Seahawks’ Richard Sherman Is Not a Thug,” so “Stop Calling Him One.”
Sherman even typed something in defense of himself: “To Those Who Would Call Me a Thug or Worse …”
“Why you mad, bro? Richard Sherman didn’t do anything wrong,” we were asked. Couldn’t have inquired any better myself. Here’s why: one, because we’re so spontaneously impassioned to react to things, kinda like we’ve always been. We have a heckuva time witnessing a funny and fleeting — and trifling — moment on live TV, and treating it as such and no more. Everything has to be indicative of Something.
But unlike a few years ago, when the instantaneous outrage to Richard Sherman speaking loudly would’ve never left our living rooms and never lived past tomorrow, it was tweeted, it was posted, it was embedded, it was criticized, it was perpetuated, it was made permanent. That’s why it’s still being talked about five days later, here and elsewhere. We’re all sources in the news now, guys. We all can be good for a quote. We have someplace to jot down our barking at the flatscreen. We can’t catch a breath and chuckle — breathe before we tweet, an offense to which pretty much all of us can confess at some point — and because we can’t, we can create a story.
Even one that never should’ve existed. Richard Sherman is just a great athlete, hyper-competitive, a seemingly good guy. (And man, is it hard to cheer for him sometimes.)
