Real Lives

      An old and wise saying states that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is just a statistic.  Our minds are simply incapable of processing a multitude of tragedies, so we gloss over them. 

      It’s telling that the old saying is most commonly attributed to Joseph Stalin.  It’s all too easy for evil men and women to manipulate our intellectual laziness.  In response, we ought always to recognize that a million deaths are a million separate tragedies.

      And, in this case, a dozen deaths are a dozen separate tragedies.  We ought to weigh carefully the lives of each of these dozen men against our own weekend pleasures and ask ourselves whether our enjoyment is worth their lives. 

      Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that the cases of former NFL players are only the beginning.  There are roughly 42 times more athletes playing in college—roughly 42 times more collisions, and roughly 42 more times as many athletes exposed to potential brain injuries.  They are far more likely to suffer in anonymity, but they will die just as ignominiously and just as senselessly. 

      There are almost 500 times as many athletes who play football in high school as in the NFL; although collisions are less forceful in the pros, they are still significant enough to cause an awful lot of concussions: 2011 study in the Journal of Athletic Training found that there are approximately 67,000 diagnosed concussions in high school football every year—and it would be naive to think that there aren’t a great number of concussions that go undiagnosed: surveys suggest that nearly 50% of all high school football players report symptoms of concussions during any given season.  Additionally, even sub-concussive impacts can cause Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, as demonstrated by the case of Chris Henry, the 26-year-old football player who died with CTE.

      It is no stretch to say that our nation has chosen to give our young men a hundred thousand concussions every year. 

      That, of course, is just a statistic, but we need to remember that each and every one of these concussions is a step down the road toward that man, sitting in his living room and thinking confused and unhappy thoughts, pointing a gun at his chest, with his hand trembling on the trigger.