THE HEADLINE: Seven teens face sex crime charges in N.J. football hazing ยป
The media is calling this bullying and hazing. But it involves the brutal and forceful act of sodomy. This is criminal. The football season was canceled. It should have been.
Iโm beginning to ponder if every football season in every school should be too-something profane for a coal regioner like me to suggest, but..itโs on my mind ..
Nonetheless, that issue aside for the moment, letโs focus on what happened in New Jersey..

CNN is among those reporting that four older players on the team sexually harassed four younger ones up to 4 times in September. The younger players were โtouched in a sexual manner.โ One was penetrated.
Most media asserts that this situation puts โhazing in focus.โ I think the opposite for me. It puts into focus the Friday night lights of worship that take place in middle class, rural, or poor communities across America. While I donโt believe the game of football is crude or rude, I am not an American prude, I do believe that in schools, more focus is put on pigskin than literature and math. I know, itโs always been that way. I get that. And yes, those Friday Night Lights are more a field a worship than one of sportmanship..
I have previously expressed myself in full concerning the way America loves its game of football in an article titled โThe False Idol Crisis.โ I stand by what I wrote, and now only amplify it further to say that we also put teenagers on pedestals and made them local yocal heroes. Something that a teenage mind of hormones and an acne-ridden bundle of nerves cannot handle..
Before you know it, youโre seeing washed up high school football stars in your local watering house. Reliving the past. Wearing the varsity jacket. And not seeing how fast time has moved on.
My local area had a case of hazing years ago, when I was a kid.. I wasnโt in the school that the broomstick incident took place in. And at that time, the world wasnโt equipped with Twitter and Tumblr. No Facebook.. just, at that time, a quiet reserve about what happened and a โdonโt talk about itโ attitude from people who were quite happy that what happened in the coal region stayed in the coal region.
That attitude was hit by reality when football stars beat an illegal Mexican man to death in Shenandoah, PA, a few years ago.
This town in New Jersey is being hit by reality, too..
There is no hiding reality in the modern worldโitโs all out there. And even when itโs not, it will be.
Sportsmanship..
Hazing.
Sex crimes.
Football in America. Under the bright lights of Friday night.
Sex crimes under the Friday night lights
Reviewed by Bryan
on
12:52:00โฏAM
Rating:
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