Feb. 9th was the 60th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, leading me to muse on what other momentous cultural (as opposed to political and international) events American society has shared in caring about and observing since. There haven’t been many. I remember that the first Super Bowl, when the AFL and the NFL agreed on a championship game between the upstart rebel league and the establishment attracted such intense interest and coverage (two networks covered the game—when has that happened since?) which was a wipe-out by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I didn’t know any families that didn’t watch that first one. Once upon a time, everybody tuned in to the Academy Awards: it was a unifying ritual, but no more. It is disturbing to think that there can’t be a unifying cultural event in the U.S. today, but I’m coming to that depressing conclusion.

Meanwhile, I hope you are boycotting the annual hoop-de-doo by the evil NFL, which happily kills its player for profit. This NFL season I didn’t catch a second of a single game, and wrote less about the cynical, ethics-free league than I have in years. The most recently discussed incident when an NFL head coach was pilloried for trying to inspire his players by extolling the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. I didn’t write about, but should have, a study from almost exactly a year ago that found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of 345 former NFL players among 376 former players studied. That’s 91.7% compared to the normal incidence of CTE in the general public, which is in the vicinity of .4% I didn’t write about it because, as far as I can tell, none of the sources, ethics and news, that I usually check for ethics stories bothered to treat the study as newsworthy. I assume that’s because they chose not to issue a buzzkill on Super Bowl week.

Think about that for a while, assuming that you haven’t played professional football and can think.

Slate, which also ignored the study (though, to be fair, the web magazine has been generally alert to CTE developments, as it was in the ominous story here), posted an opinion piece on why so many Americans celebrate the Super Bowl with parties as they watch young men guaranteeing that their post-football lives will be nasty, brutish and short while sponsors, celebrities (like Taylor Swift) and billionaire team owners cash in on the slaughter. Titled “Contact sports cause CTE. So why are Americans watching more football than ever?,” neurologist Adina Wise writes in part,

…in the 20-plus years since neuropathological evidence of this disease was first found in the brains of NFL players, I have scarcely heard anyone suggest that, as a result, they plan to reconsider their fandom. One of the reasons for this is obvious…the symptoms of CTE may not emerge until years after the head injuries happen. This delay in onset is not unusual for neurodegenerative illnesses — the initial physiological insults that eventually produce the well-known symptoms of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease may take place decades before any deficits are outwardly apparent. This chronological gap between event and consequence has undoubtedly made the public less likely to shoulder any misgivings about tuning in to Monday Night Football. And, while it’s true that a smattering of articles considering the ethics of watching football have emerged as research linking CTE to contact sports has continued to accumulate,  both college and professional football viewership are on the rise.

Another reason for Americans’ seeming indifference to the neurological fates of the athletes whose jerseys they proudly don is, I would venture, good old cognitive dissonance. The brain regions most commonly implicated in the mental phenomenon responsible for making us a bit queasy when trying to hold two competing beliefs at once are the left anterior insula and multiple areas of the frontal lobe, which deal in the realms of unpleasant emotion and executive function, respectively. Cognitive neuroscience research has shown, repeatedly, that when we choose between two ideas or actions that are at odds with each other (i.e., “I wish to mitigate suffering secondary to neurological illness” and “Go Steelers!”), we actually change our preferences simply by making the choice, a process which we then feel compelled to justify. Thus, if we decide to keep watching football, our brains conclude, perhaps the research on contact-sports and CTE is inconclusive?

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

I suppose this is another example of my generally failed professional life. If I were not such a dilettante boob and had accumulated sufficient financial resources as so many of my peers, friends and colleagues have done, maybe Ethics Alarms (and I ) would have significant influence. I could issue a podcast; I could write some books (or finish a few); I could spend the funds necessary to promote the blog. I know I’m shouting in the cyber wilderness here, but unfortunately, it’s the best I can do, entirely due to my too often selfish choices and foolish priorities over the years. Heck, my WordPress fee to keep ads off of EA is due next month, and I’m already sweating how I’m going to pay it.

But I digress. Sorry, I’m feeling especially like not singing “My Way” these days. I guess if I have helped convince a few intelligent people to boycott the Super Bowl, that’s something. It is, after all, the right thing to do.