When I was about 19, my girlfriend at the time (in fact, my first girlfriend ever) invited me to a barbecue at her father’s house. I didn’t really know anyone but I did spark up a conversation with her uncle. He began explaining his career path from law-student to exterminator and said something that left an indelible mark on my mind even up to today. When he got into law, he believed he would change the world one case at a time, but he realized that he was consistently more passionate about certain societal causes than anyone else, and often times he would find himself alone on the issue, while others who previously stated they cared, became disinterested. And then he said, “the great thing about extermination is that people don’t want you to get rid of SOME of the bugs, they want you to fix the entire problem. If that’s how society worked with important issues, I wouldn’t be crawling around people’s attics lookin’ for roaches.”
At the time, I was just a young man about to begin university who was hopeful about embarking on a successful career in writing where I would change the world, one article at a time. And although 19 seems like a lifetime ago, that talk still lingers in my mind. While I am not an activist like he was, I sometimes look at the fleeting rage we apply in select circumstances to important social issues. I realize that collectively, we have have incredibly shaky morals when it comes to fighting for issues we allegedly care about. In the past two weeks, no topic has exemplified that point more than our brief indignation of domestic abuse in the NFL.
Bashing Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Ray McDonald and now Jonathan Dwyer is easy. In fact, it’s so simple that you can craft a snarky-ass tweet, send it out to all your followers and then pat yourself on the back for “doing your part” as an ally for abuse survivors. Writers are crafting this week’s think pieces, and we’re even calling for the NFL commissioner to lose his job over this situation to really “sock it to the man.”Hell, even Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has publicly shamed Rice and the NFL, which is awesome – well, until you realize/remember that he voted against the Violence Against Women Act in 2012, which provided grants to state and local governments for services for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, including housing, legal assistance and law enforcement training.
But Rubio is not alone in being, well, a rube.
The House Judiciary Committee recently sent Roger Goodell a letter informing him of their disapproval of his (mis)handling of the Ray Rice incident. In the letter, there was a part I found particularly interesting:
“Given the important role the NFL and the other major professional sports leagues can play in shaping public perceptions concerning domestic violence, it would appear to be in the public interest to have the highest level of transparency associated with reviews of potential misconduct.”
Seeing how much negative attention a running back is rightfully getting for laying hands on his woman, one can only imagine how much hell someone would catch if they were indicted on similar charges but had a far more important job – like being a judge. Well, actually we don’t need to wonder, because Federal District Judge Mark Fuller beat the shit out of his wife at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Atlanta last month.
His punishment? A plea bargain that requires him to go to 6 months of counseling and a substance abuse evaluation which, upon completion, will lead to his record of arrest being expunged. No jail time, no public shaming, no trending on Twitter and no losing his job and livelihood which can only come at the hands of congress through impeachment proceedings. But they’re busy dealing with a football player, so actually coming together to punish a federal judge is clearly not important.
We scold Ray Rice while at the same time accepting other domestic abusers into our collective hearts. (R. Kelly, Chad Johnson, Floyd Mayweather ring a bell?)
Look at how the Baltimore Ravens, the Carolina Panthers and the San Francisco 49ers have been criticized for not taking their athletes off the field fast enough as they go through their abuse trials. Whether convicted or not, the general consensus amongst most anti-abuse advocates is that players should be taken off the field as soon as they commit an offense.
But where is the outrage at Hope Solo being allowed to start at goalie for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team amidst her domestic violence campaign? Is it because no one in America “cares” about women’s soccer, or is it because no one in America really cares about domestic violence caused by women?
Many of us (myself included) had tons of jokes after Solange laid hands on Jay-Z in that elevator, and many of us even went so far as to try and hypothesize what Jay did to PROVOKE Solange into hitting him while Beyonce sat back and watched.
Instead of using this as the “opportunist story of the week”, we need to follow the lead of the great men and women who doing their part to topple this bullshit. We need more men to be everyday advocates like Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback William Gay, a man who lost his mother to domestic violence after she was shot to death by his stepfather when he was only seven. And we need more women like Monique Coleman to continue to raise awareness.
Domestic abuse is not a game, a joke or an issue to be laughed at. It’s not an issue that should enact only temporary rage. By pretending we care so much about domestic violence, we forget how much more work needs to be done to even come close to eradicating this social ill. Since a woman is beaten every 9 seconds in the US, and three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends everyday in this country, then this is NOT an issue that should EVER be taken lightly by the crowd of people who actively believe they are staunch advocates of social change.
Every year, 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence in their households, and studies show that men who witness domestic violence as children are twice as likely to abuse their own wives. Regardless of one’s fame, career, age, or gender, if we’re serious about killing the vermin of domestic abuse, we need to REALLY care about exterminating it everywhere in our house.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.