The Greatest Super Bowl – Or The Darkest?

Give us what we want and we won’t be critical if you poison us. If it tastes good it must be good for us.

In terms of the game itself, assuming you could separate the game from television and tickets costing thousands of dollars, it was a great game.

But when will we say “enough”? Enough of the hedonistic insanity of purchasing tickets to a GAME for thousands of dollars. People are not going to a game, they are going to an event, a happening, a worship service where they will bow down to the idols of money and power and success. The NFL says, “Come and worship. Come and pay and worship.”

And we come.

Then we talk about the commercials – but do we talk about the darkness of the commercials? The commercials for movies and television shows were dark, darker, and darkest. If this is what we are watching on television, if this is what we are paying to see in the movies – and it must be otherwise these shows and movies would not be churned out – then our Monday-morning conversation ought not to be about the Patriots’ comeback win, it ought to be about whether our society can come back from the darkness into which it has descended.

But we check our critical thinking when we turn the television on, we check our critical thinking when we worship at the altar of the NFL, or most other places of worship coming to us via television or the movies or the radio or the internet (blogs must be the exception). We cannot see the darkness because we live in the darkness.

If we “are what we eat” then it is also true that “we are what we think” – if what we put in our bodies is important, then what we put in our minds is also important – and if the darkness and violence of what was portrayed in the Super Bowl commercials is what is in our minds then we ought to try to rouse one another to escape the opium den we are in. Is there no one awake in this place? Are we all consigned to the stupor of the drugs of violence and wanton sex and power and hedonism?

We ought not to be taking about what a great game the Super Bowl was, we ought to be asking what has happened to us.