Tiptoeing Around the Obvious

Reporting of  recent instances of professional football players beating women has featured a lot of feigned surprise,  obligatory outrage, and cautious  tiptoeing around the question of possible causes and remedies when the answer as to causes is obvious. The NFL is comprised in fairly large part of brutal, lower class hoodlums who behave in the manner of brutal, lower class hoodlums. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of these particular hoodlums have been coddled and protected from facing the consequences of their misdeeds since the time in their youth when some coach noticed they could be good football players. (In the NFL most of these hoodlums are black, but race is mainly irrelevant to the situation, and there is little reason to suppose things would be very much different in a league populated with lower class toughs of another race.)

The reluctance in the traditional media to face the obvious is informative and illustrates a general problem.  Political correctness often makes it difficult , or in some venues impossible,  to state things as they are. Beating women is mainly a practiced by  those in the lower social classes and is a result  of the culture and character of men in those classes.  (Yes, as the politically correct insist on reminding us, there are middle and upper class women who get beaten by their middle and upper class husbands. There are also non-smokers who get lung cancer, but in neither case is that where the main problems, risks, and need for attention are.)  The solution for football is either to have fewer such  people  in the game, starting in the colleges, or to police the goons better with draconian punishments within the teams and league. Neither is particularly likely. Instead those in the league probably will try to smooth  things over with public relations work, pink uniforms and other things designed to fool the foolish.

Something similar is  true with respect to poverty. While there are many exceptions, a habitually poor, healthy adult man is usually poor because of his own choices and failings.  The fault is not society’s, nor his more industrious neighbors’, but his. He is not trashy because he is poor. He is poor because he is trashy. Of course one won’t likely be hearing that noted in traditional media either.