Every time something like the most recent Ray Rice thing, or the countless examples before that, comes up, I have to question what I choose to do with my life. I choose to cover sports, a culture that endorses victim blaming, a culture that says that smoking pot deserves more punishment than raping someone, a culture that constantly finds ways to defy the amount of social progress and change seen in a lot of the world around us.
Do I, by covering it, add my signature? Do I, in my silence because I find no words to speak, sign off on this? Am I tarred with the same brush as the legion of Facebook commenters who see nothing wrong with how their heroes act off the field when I stop typing because I am too tired to add relevant discussion?
As a woman, I am outraged. As a human being, I am horrified. Making the victim of an assault…apologize? Apologize for what? For existing? For trusting someone enough to marry them? For "her role in this," her role being knocked out by her husband? How is this possible? How is this allowable?
Maybe "making" isn't the correct word. Maybe "encouraging." Maybe "coercing." Maybe simply "allowing." Maybe it's even love, a love as I don't know it, as she married him after the abuse occurred. Maybe it's something I can't understand that makes her feel like she needs to apologize, not for him, but for herself.
Maybe I'm too sensitive. Maybe I'm not allowing for time or place or circumstance, because God knows I don't know what it's like to be a professional athlete. Perhaps, in condemning the culture, I'm offending the good, upstanding, excellent human beings I know exist within it. That's what happens, though, when such atrocities like that are allowed to exist.
I just know that there are fewer things that hurt more than being told through actions yet again that if anything were to happen to me while I was doing my job as a sportswriter, it would be my fault because I allowed myself to exist within the sacred sphere of sports.
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