Attention deficit

As a New Englander, I'm fascinated by the controversy swirling around whether Tom Brady and his team deliberately deflated footballs to make them easier to grasp and throw. After the recent Wells report claimed the Pats had cheated and Tom lied about it, the Patriots fan base came out swinging. There were close analyses of the science behind the allegations. When is the last time your heard a football fan discuss the Ideal Gas Law? And close scrutiny of whether the testimony (or lack of it) backed up the conclusions reached in the summary. Worthy of world class defense attorneys! Not to mention the unrelenting focus on whether the sanctions are in line with past decisions and are proportional to the offense. Laudable!

But as a Christian, I just had to wonder why the same level of fascination with a game -- albeit a very expensive and high-stakes game -- is not applied to other pressing problems? Can you imagine if we all paid this much attention to police violence? Or pervasive racism? Or poverty? Or wealth disparity? To tackle those problems, we create a subset of  special class of people -- scientists and lawyers. We subject them to every pressure imaginable -- we bully them as youth, ridicule them as adults, underfund them, place restrictions on their speech and mock them in the media. Those who survive this gauntlet -- such as innovative scientists and committed civil rights attorneys -- are the ones we send out to fight against the greatest evils humankind has ever known. Actually, we don't even send them; they send themselves.

The irony, as we  are seeing with Deflate-gate, is that ordinary football fans are perfectly capable of parsing the minutest details of complex problems. No fancy degrees or years of unrewarding toil required. But only, evidently, if the problems are in the form of a spheroid, the rules spelled out and the scope of action confined to a 100-yard patch of grass.

If only we could package racism and global poverty as a team sports...