No NFL in this house (Updated)

 

Frodo, the last surviving dog from the atrocious dog fighting ring died on December 18th. Jonny Justice, another surviving dog died 2 days before that. You can read the story here on these dogs.  I wrote this last February, right before the Super Bowl. My feeling have not changed. I still think Michael Vick is pure scum. I don't mind saying so and I don't care who agrees with me. I will never not write about this. Never. This was my last column. There will be another and another so people don't forget.

I will not partake in the Super Bowl. No parties, no team, no viewing of the game. Today I find that disheartening but not surprising.

I love football. I have loved football since I have a memory of football. I loved it as a little girl; I loved it as a high schooler (go Dreadnaughts); and I loved it as an adult. 

Michael Vick, professional dog killer, ruined that for me. After the NFL chose to allow him to come back to a game, a profession that paid him an astronomical salary to throw a football, I chose to not support the NFL ever. 

There are many, and I know them, who say it doesn't matter. My support is a pin prick of the support the athletes of the NFL and the NFL itself receives. I don't care. The minute we allow ourselves to become so caught up in a game that we overlook the heinous crime of dogfighting, we have lost some of our humanity.

Michael Vick had the world. He threw it away by fighting dogs. He didn't deserve to come back. He is scum to me even though some people argue he paid his debt to society. He didn't. He bargained and finagled and got all the charges of actually dog fighting dropped. His charges were only running an interstate gambling operation.

Gambling? Yep. This had nothing to do with cards or numbers but it did have to do with the explicit purpose of breeding dogs to fight one another until their death. Should the dog he entered lose, the dogs were then lowered in to a swimming pool with batteries attached to their heads and electrocuted. They were slammed on concrete until their heads burst open. He did not deserve to come back to football. 

So, as many people are paying huge amounts of money to watch a game that celebrates people like Michael Vick, I will be here, with my two rescue dogs, watching a romantic comedy on Netflix.  We wonder about how our country got to the point it is. Perhaps we can start looking backward at what we have accepted and allowed as a society.