We need to calm down
I oppose firing people because you disagree with them. I’d get fired four days a week for what I type for this space. Well, five, counting what I say in a weekly video. Well, seven, counting what I put on social media.
Heck, I’d get fired three times each half-hour if you count just living.
“I need to buy a few things at the [flower-getting place],” she says first thing in the morning.
“I disagree. That backyard is an overgrown jungle already,” I say, and I’m fired as a husband before coffee.
I’m kidding. I don’t get fired as a husband. I just get outvoted 1-to-1.
Do you know how many games the Kansas City Chiefs won last year by three points or fewer? That would be five, including preseason and the 25-22 win in the Super Bowl over the San Francisco 49ers.
Do you know how you get three points in pro football? You have a guy on your team whose specialty is kicking the ball between the uprights of the goal post, preferably from long distances.
The kicker for Kansas City, Harrison Butker, is maybe the best in the business. He made 33 of 35 of these three-point kicks last season. The math suggests that he is, in his way, as important to the team as Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
But there are petitions pouring into the Chiefs’ headquarters demanding this kicker be fired because he said something the petitioners disagree with.
The petitioners say that what he said was especially harmful to women, and I agree, if offensiveness is harm. But he doesn’t inflict actual damages unless he’s in a tyrannical majority, which is as-yet isn’t, or is a dictator.
And here’s the thing: There are people with heartfelt value systems based on a very narrow and punitive view of Christianity, rather than the real one of love and service. The way to deal with them is to outvote them, out-persuade them and set better examples than they set. It’s not to answer their narrow religion of punishment with a narrow worldview of punishment.
Let’s say a guy expresses the opinion that Donald Trump should be president. That’s harmful to the Constitution, the nation, to decency, to women, to men who don’t know any better, indeed to all of humanity. But not all people think that. Seven-four million Americans didn’t think that with their votes for president four years ago.
You can’t take 74 million Americans out of the labor force for having that opinion and long thrive as an economy.
Political troglodytes and culture troglodytes are covered in the Bill of Rights and needed as participants in the economy. Name-callers are too, thank goodness.
A person can think Trump is swell and fix my plumbing any day. I reject the cancel culture when it comes to needing the air conditioning repaired when it’s 98 degrees. Send a guy in a MAGA hat if he’s a trained technician.
Some of these people who favor Trump are very nice. Having disastrously ill-informed political views is neither a crime nor a character-definer. One can vote to destroy our democracy without meaning to.
As a Kansas City Chiefs’ fan because of the way they play and the mid-American region they represent and the fact that their coach is a lovable fat guy with a mustache (that freezes on single-digit January days), I want this kicker to keep kicking for the Chiefs.
I say that even as he believes a woman’s most rewarding role is as wife and mother in the home and says so publicly when invited to give his opinions at a commencement address at a Catholic school. I say so even as he thinks and says that alternative gender and sexual orientations are biblical abominations, and that Joe Biden is a disgrace to Catholicism.
We need to calm down around here. A troglodyte can’t hurt you unless you empower him by mimicry.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.