Sadly, Philadelphia Eagles' wide receiver Riley Cooper appears to be the latest to unwittingly cross into the dark side of the politically correct spectrum. During some sort of confrontation with a security guard at a public event, Cooper uttered a racial slur.
In and of itself, of course, this would not normally be a big deal. After all, who would seriously doubt a wide variety of such "slurs" continue to be spoken millions of times every day, in every town or rural area across the country by peoples of different stripes? Let's not kid ourselves. It happens. Always has and likely always will. Sure, there are many who have strived to abolish such words and phrases, but all they've really accomplished is to drive them "underground" and, at that, only for those the biased language police deem culpable in such offenses. In other words, some people can say certain things -- and others can't.
In Cooper's case, there's no denying it. His rant was captured on video/audio, which was posted on-line and quickly went viral. He said/did it. Yours truly, who continues to disdain social networking sites as being somewhat akin to STDs, sans the thrill of victory, has only seen the censored version of the clip on TV. Yet it's probably not a stretch to assume Cooper used the dreaded "n" word. Oops.
Without getting into the on-going hypocrisy of who is OK with uttering such words, and who is not, Cooper quickly found himself under serious fire. The media pounced. Talking heads had fresh meat to carve up. And, oh my, such folks couldn't wait to cast their dragnet as far and wide as they could, hunting down and eliciting sound bytes from those they thought may have been offended by what Cooper said. Anything to hype a story.
So what did Riley Cooper do? He quickly confronted the hoard of cameras and reporters, and owned up to his indiscretion. He apologized to the Eagle organization, his coaches, his teammates, Philly fans, and anybody else that he may have offended. Cooper went on to say that while he had been drinking, that was no excuse for the words that had came out of his mouth. He appeared deeply regretful, and promised it would never happen again.
Yet, that didn't seem to be good enough for some. Hugh Douglas, a former player that's been out of the NFL for almost a decade, said Cooper, a white guy, only apologized because he got caught. As circumstances would have it, Mr. Douglas just happens to be black. Imagine that.
However, in a twisted sense, Douglas' comment may have some merit. Of course Cooper was only forced to apologize because he got caught, and the episode exploded into a media circus. Had Cooper been one of the millions of anonymous people of ALL stripes uttering such "slurs" everyday across the country, this would not have been newsworthy. Nobody would have noticed, hence no apology required.
Then again, one is left to wonder what people like Douglas expect out of Cooper. The man stepped up and owned his misdeed, apologized, and was further fined an undisclosed amount by the Eagles.
So what else could Cooper do? Deny he ever said it? That wouldn't work. Stay silent? In this day and age, that doesn't appear to be an option either. Thrust out his chest, say the same words, and defiantly proclaim, "How do you like me now, Hugh?". Good luck with that.
In the end, Shakespeare had it right. In the whole scheme of things, it's all much ado about nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment