Hitting, ubiquitously

SUNDAY IN AMERICA, early autumn, and its back to the gladiatorial combats for millions of angry americans who find both an outlet for their pent up aggression and a stimulus for more at the stadium, or in front of the big screen. For those of you in Russia who may not know, due to preoccupation with Putin the pugilist for your sporting amusement, in america high school football is played on friday night, college football is played on saturday, and professional, old man's football is played on sunday. We work our way up the ladder, each day, to a higher level. How cleverly american, saving the best for the last, each week! Public relations, advertising, marketing, selling, american. It is not possible for a person, any person, to play football in high school, college, and professional and not get injured. Its very difficult to play high school football and avoid injury. The dominant cause of football injuries, as you would suppose, is high impact collisions. People colliding with eith each other, or the ground, as a result of colliding with each other. For some strange reason, during the past decade, or last few decades, it has very gradually but very definitely become much more important in football to not only create collisions, but to create high impact collisions. The higher the impact, the better. No impact is too great, if it is legal, in accordance with the rules of football, which allow for very very high impact collisions, higher than is necessary to accomplish the goal of tackling the ball carrier. The terms "block" and "tackle" have been replaced by the term "hit". Its a term we all use, ubiquitously. (If you can find a way to work in the word "ubiquitous", go for it.) The harder you hit, the better. We all seem to love it, to encourage it. This ignores the simple fact that hitting harder, blocking and tackling with great force, does not increase the effectiveness of either. Effectiveness is what matters, not impact. Stop the other player from advancing down the field. In our modern hard hitting football, [people who have been hit often continue down the filed, because the hit was hard, but ineffective. Hard hitting has cheapened american football, maed it less efficient, less effective, less artistic and skillful. And also, of course, it has greatly increased both the number and severity of injuries. Now we are seeing a whole new generation of elderly americans, retired professional football players, with very serious illnesses resulting from football. About sixty years ago we began making football helmets out of hard plastic, rather than leather, and the change began, slowly at first, which has resulted in teh avalance of hard hits and injuries we see today, and which, evidently, we all prefer. At least, we as a society have been very slow to recognize and talk about it. Football is more popular than ever. The more this problem is pointed out, and the more vocal people become is wanting to do something to change it, the mmore conservative football fans, like, say our friend rush limbaugh will attack the desire for changes as tragic and stupid. rush is already predicting, half jokingly, that football will disappear because of the uproar over injuries and hard hitting. Beware; millions of americans love the hard hitting and do not seem to care about the injuries, so change will not be sudden. We may get to have a little gladiatorial fun before the kill joy safety first crowd takes over, returns us to leather helmets, and ruins everything.