Nothing new: Remember in 1986 when PSU played Thug U, aka Miami for the National Title, the Miami team staged a walk-out during the teams meal stating something along the lines of "the Japanese didn't sit down to eat with the enemy:", and Jon Bruno, our punter retorted; "didn't the Japanese lose World War 2"??? It's stupid what the media does, but until these people actually experience being in live combat, they will think that war is a game like they play on Xbox...
I'm not a veteran. But my father was a WW2 combat veteran. 28th Division 112th Regiment Company K. I just saw a commercial on Fox that takes excerpts from Eisenhower's speech to the troops on D Day...you know the "you are about to embarck on the great crusade.. the eyes of the world are upon you." They are equating Michigan vs OSU to war?
What the hell are they thinking? There are thousands of 18 and 19 year old boys buried not far from the beaches of Normandy.
How can anyone with a functioning brain equate a football game to D Day?
What an insult to our greatest generation and everyone who ever risked their lives for our way of life. Someone should lose their job.
I'm a Viet Nam vet, authorized to wear the CIB, and, over the years, have seen and heard comments along the lines of the one you refer to more times than I remember.
At first they caused some real anger, which probably took a decade or so to begin to overcome. To do that, it was necessary to find a way to accept the realization that any statement, made for whatever reason, which compares what goes on in a kids' game played with a ball to what happens during contact with your enemy in a hot war, stems from an ignorant, unthinking, disrespectful, immature naivety on the part of the maker who, in the final analysis -- like every one of us -- represents nothing more than the product of all his yesterdays as a member of an immature-, but hopefully maturing-, society which itself has significant growing up left to do. Will it be given enough time to do that? Who knows? As time passes and my own gets shorter, I increasingly suspect that our society, plus others around the World of which they are all a part, will ultimately force themselves into a position where the only realistic choice left to be made is simple and straightforward:
Grow up,
now, or
blow up. But one thing I am sure of: Trying to settle human differences by killing each other, sometimes on an industrial scale, or "war" for short, is not to be compared with a kids' game. It is simple insanity. No other term for it.
