Fans Don’t Get To Change The Score At Gunpoint Because They’re Sure A Bad Call Cost Them The Game
If the MAGA Republicans had a sports team they’d claim that they won every game they lost because the refs were against them
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
It Started With Davy Crockett & Homilies About Omelets
I blame Davy Crockett.
When I was very young, Walt Disney produced a series of TV movies that glorified Davy Crockett, a hero who could do no wrong. From time to time Crockett, played by actor Fess Parker, would deliver pithy sayings which we children latched onto as pronouncements of absolute Truth.
The most memorable of these was, “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead” which, as children, we saw as permission to do anything we thought was necessary to achieve a goal that we personally decided was Right.
As adults we know that this Davy-Crockett notion of the-ends-justify-the-means is completely, totally, thoroughly wrong. It is absolutely wrong to do a wrong thing in the pursuit of what you’re sure is the Right Thing.
The old saw that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs” is similarly wrong. You do not have permission to commit crimes, harm others, or resort to violence in the pursuit of some goal that you have decided is “right” even if your goal is, in fact, right.
Having Good Intentions Is Not Enough
Your child is sick and needs an operation. For whatever reason the surgeon has refused to perform the procedure. No, you don’t have the right to take the doctor hostage and demand, at gunpoint, that s/he operate on your child. And no, the fact that you need money to pay for your child’s surgery is not a valid excuse to rob a bank.
You Don’t Get To Change The Score Because You Think A Bad Call Cost You The Game
Every week some official in some professional sport makes a bad call. Sometimes you have irrefutable video evidence that s/he was absolutely wrong, that the player was in bounds, out of bounds, fouled, not fouled, whatever.
It doesn’t matter. The call and the eventual score remain in force in spite of the fact that the ref was demonstrably wrong.
Fans, certain that the ref was wrong, don’t get to storm the field and put a gun to the official’s head to make him/her reverse the disliked call. The aggrieved fans don’t get to break into the control room and order the technician to add or remove points from the board.
Your losing team doesn’t still get to go to the playoffs because they believe that, but for the bad call, they would have won, even if they are right.
Every game, every system, is run according to a set of rules, and when the rules say you lost and you’ve pursued and lost all the appeals that the system allows, then, even if you are actually right and you should have won, you still have lost. Game over. The end.
You Don’t Get To Take The Law Into Your Own Hands
I personally believe that OJ Simpson was guilty of the murders of which he stood accused. I think it was a miscarriage of justice for the jury to acquit him. But they did and that’s the end of it.
There are, I am sure, many cases where juries have found innocent people guilty, but none of that means that citizens, even those who correctly believe that the jury got it wrong, are entitled to kidnap a released defendant and lynch him or stage a prison break to free someone whom they are sure has been wrongfully convicted.
Courts make mistakes every day, and we have to live with them because if we don’t, then the only system we will have left will be violence and chaos where people get punished or released, people win or lose, depending on who has the biggest mob that they can mobilize to enforce their personal view of reality.
Right or wrong, people have to abide by the decisions of the refs, the umpires, the judges and the courts. If people can ignore the calls they don’t like and resort to force to make things go the way they think they should then we’re going to be living in a country like the ones run by war lords and cartels who kill people or release them based on the pure exercise of power.
If you can prove that a judge or a jury was bribed or got it wrong then there are specific procedures for making that argument to a higher court. But if your appeals are rejected then you are done.
MAGA Republicans Think The Way To Win The Game Is To Attack The Refs
Sadly, a large percentage of the members of the Republican Party don’t understand this.
MAGA Republicans think that if they can’t win a dispute on the facts or the law that they can grab a victory by trashing the judge.
Like little kids fascinated by Davy Crockett’s folksy wisdom, the MAGA Republicans think that if an election was “stolen” and the courts have refused to rule in their favor then they’re entitled to raise a mob and storm the Capital in order to enforce their idea of how things should have gone.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the MAGA Republicans had a professional sports team? Every time they won it would be great.
Every time they lost they would run around whining about how the game was stolen and demanding that their team go to the playoffs or the Super Bowl or whatever because they only lost because some official made a bad call and that therefore they didn’t really lose at all.
They are sorest of sore losers, not just because when they lose they whine about the contest not being “fair”, but because they don’t understand that whether the officials were against them or not doesn’t matter any more than it matters if the ref got it wrong or if the jury came to the wrong conclusion.
Right Or Wrong, We Have To Live With the Refs’ Calls
People think a lot of things, but what people think doesn’t matter. What matters is not what people think. What matters is what they can prove, and in the proof department the MAGA-Republicans have failed miserably.
Let me repeat that.
It Isn’t What You Believe That Counts. It’s What You Can Prove
Whether they think 2020 Presidential election was stolen, whether they think that the Arizona governor’s election was stolen, means nothing.
What matters is whether the cry-baby MAGA Republicans are able to present reliable evidence sufficient to convince a court that they are right.
And they failed to do that every single time. More than sixty judges in over sixty court hearings have unanimously told them, “Believing something is so doesn’t make it so. You have failed to prove your claims. You lose.”
If you fail to convince the trial judge and fail to convince the appellate judges then you’re done. That’s the end of it.
You don’t get to storm the Capital to install your guy in the White House by force of arms because you’re convinced that you’re right, any more than the people who think OJ was guilty, as I do, get to storm the jail and drag him off to the nearest tree.
Life Isn’t Perfect & Often It’s Not Fair. Too Bad
Davy Crockett was absolutely wrong, and so is Kari Lake in Arizona and so are the other whining, cry-baby MAGA Republicans who invaded the Capital on January 6th.
You absolutely don’t get to go ahead just because you’re sure you’re right, even if you are.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
