Having just completed watching Avengers: Endgame and the Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones in the span of about six hours, my brain is in a frenzied state currently. The best you’ll get out of me this week are short sentences while I look behind me to make sure nobody is sneaking up behind me with Valerian steel.
- Outrage of the Week is on the Kansas City Chiefs for not releasing Tyreek Hill after an audio tape appeared to corroborate the alleged abuse of his young son. As someone who works in a bureaucratic paperwork dome, trust me on this one. Let the paperwork process proceed and express outage to me only if he’s still on the team at training camp. Trust me. He’s dead to the Kansas City Chiefs.
- It does set a pretty troubling pattern that the Chiefs or NFL will only get tough on someone after a video tape or audio comes out of an incident. Happened with Kareem Hunt and now Hill as it’s happened with numerous other NFL players. The upside on this coin is that the audio and video are everywhere so the bad guys or girls have to change their behavior.
- Jumping off of my column last week about how much money was raised for the Notre Dame church, a point of clarification. This is not an indictment on “the Church” per se. It’s an indictment on what drives people to action. Avengers: Endgame raised nearly the same amount of money in about the same amount of time. $1.2 Billion in its first four days of release. I ponied up the $15 to go see it in 3-D, even. Could I have sent that $15 to a charity? Yeah, I probably should have. Did I? Nope. I ate too much popcorn and watched a CGI raccoon run across the screen. Could Disney, which owns the franchise, have said half the money made will go to solve world hunger? Sure. But did they? Nope.
If there’s a common thread between these two stories, it is this – people will not change their behavior unless money comes into play. For the positive, it’s the discussion of charity and what forces a charitable donation. Maybe people realize they were sitting on cash troves and are a little more charitable from now on.
On the downside, the companies and institutions like the NFL or Disney likely won’t change their behaviors until the public tells them. Not via social media or a strongly worded letter, but with their dollars. If the NFL truly loses money every time they sign or draft a domestic abuser. Or if the movie studios are never challenged to do better with the billions in profits that go to the bottom line, or any multitude of other examples, then things will never change. It is truly a status quo that pushes the rich richer and the have-nots notter.
So, do I put my money where my mouth is on this? Truthfully, I probably will see Endgame a second time. And I’ll probably buy Chiefs tickets this year. But one of these days, maybe that will get better – and it won’t take a Thanos finger snap to get there.
(Get more thoughts from The Landmark’s Chris Kamler on Twitter where he is known as @TheFakeNed. Or check him out on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube)