But you can only gain that empathy if you open your eyes. If you don’t wanna watch an injury replay, fine. I’m not gonna go the full Chappelle and call you a pussy for it. But for those of us who do have the stomach for such things—and most people do—it’s both negligent and rude to hop up on your little soapbox and demand the production truck show everyone a picture of a fucking Labradoodle instead of what just happened. Fuck off. You don’t get to be the MPAA of the telecast. If I wanna watch Buster Posey’s ankle snap over and over again—out of curiosity, or even for reasons I can’t quite articulate—I should be given that option. It’s okay to look. It’s okay to be fascinated by pain. It’s okay to want to know it, even experience it vicariously.
Because this is already a country that has had everything pre-whitewashed for it. You never see the close-up, violent consequences of war on any newscast. You’re never shown the bodies after yet another mass shooting. You never have to watch a person die of COVID on a screen, unless it’s your loved one and an ICU nurse has to hand you an iPad to say goodbye to them. Americans take every last step to shield themselves from seeing the bad things, as if that will magically protect them from future harm. It won’t, and it certainly won’t absolve them from patronizing leagues, businesses, and government agencies that inflict that harm upon others. Instead, they pretend there’s some magical baseline of ugliness they can digest that will render them compassionate but not unhappy. I’m fucking sick of it. Get over yourselves and watch the goddamn replay. You’ll live. I know I did.
