The National Football League season starts tonight. I watched my first pro football game, Packers versus Lions in 1956 and have been a football fan ever since. Maribel says I'm a fanatic and sometimes tells me to settle down when I get worked up during a game. I haven't been to a live game in 17 years and don't expect to ever again. I won't be watching on television either. The major sports organizations including the NFL have become a political arm of the black lives matter movement. Tonight the TV cameras and commentators will not be focused on football. It will be all about how the owners, teams and individual players choose to display their solidarity against racial injustice. The letters BLM will be plastered all over everything...shoes, jerseys, helmets, headbands, armbands, on the field itself, in the stands, and on the popcorn boxes at the vendor kiosks. At the end of the season there will be a trophy presented. Yes, there will be the Lombardi trophy, but the biggest and most prominent will be the BLM trophy presented to the team who showed the most imagination, creativity and piety in support of the black lives matter movement. It's hard not to sympathize with those black athletes who will return in their Mercedes to their million dollar homes after the game. Anyway, I won't be watching football tonight.
The movement, including the ugly protests will at some point lose their momentum and things will settle down but there will be a residual effect. A possibility is something like half of all employees for any business or agency, private and public must be black. And if they are not qualified, the employer must provide training. Applications for employment will be forbidden to request information about prior, present or future criminal activity, present address, gender or marital status. Don't laugh. I've seen lots of changes in my lifetime.
The virus, when it's finally over will also have changed the landscape. Stand-alone fast food joints like Chick-fil-A and Del Taco may never again have indoor seating. Their drive around systems are working so well there is no need to bother about in-door customers. It seem to me that as I drive past them that they have more business now that they've ever had. I have to admit that driving the double circle thingy at Chick-fil-A is kinda fun. In contrast, places like IHOP without a drive thru system have nearly empty parking lots. Many of these types of restaurants are resorting to home delivery. I wonder if they deliver just one burger and an order of fries. And what that would cost.
Since the Covid thing began we have eaten only a few times in restaurants, and felt a bit apprehensive each time. One time was in Golden Corral. The disturbing part for us was that there were no servers at the buffet lines, so each customer used the same serving utensil to fill their plate. I can't think of a faster way to spread the virus. This last Tuesday we ate at Logan's Roadhouse to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary. It felt more secure to us but different. Normally Logan's is rocking every night but this night there were few customers, and they were deliberately seated very far apart. The music was jacked up but it didn't help to dispel the almost somber atmosphere. The waitress said that's the way it has been since February. The good part was that our fillets were done perfectly as were the rest of the meals, and I had a margarita on the rocks that tasted like heaven after not having one since my heart surgery.
I like to shop in stores for things I want. Like books. To my knowledge Barnes & Nobel is the last of the big book stores. I would hate for there not to be book stores. To me books, like trees have souls. I want to read from a book in my hands, not from a computer screen or worse listen to a disc. I know that internet shopping will maybe eliminate brick and mortar stores. Even Barnes & Nobel is promoting no-contact book shipping which to me is digging their own grave. But now that I think about it, remote buying is not new. When I was a kid our family used to look forward to the arrival of the Sears catalog, which had its beginnings in the late 1800s. When it came, I think it was twice each year we'd sit at the kitchen table and the whole family would look at it page by page. I don't remember that we ever ordered anything, the country was still recovering from the Great Depression and there wasn't a lot of money to go around but it was fun to make a wish list of what we liked.
But Sears and its catalog are gone, and the social and business climates are changing so fast that I don't think anyone can predict what our country and the rest of the world will look like when the BLM and Covid dust has settled. I am pretty sure that whatever emerges, Maribel and me will be happy in our little corner of Georgia.
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