•  Zednix   ( @Zednix@lemmy.ca ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    31 year ago

    They will still be selling these jerseys for charity at least. There won’t be any more inquisitions when players don’t want to participate so there will be less outrage. The NHL probably sees the negativity around bud light and other brands and noped out of doing anything at all.

    If there wasn’t outrage when a player decides not to participate and instead we fully ignored them like they are invisible it might be a better way to promote the positivity you would like to see. The addiction to outrage needs to stop.

    •  Troy   ( @troyunrau@lemmy.ca ) OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year ago

      You’re probably not wrong.

      When I was in grad school, we had a “graduate student association”, which was basically a student union. People would come to us with proposals to allocate $1000 to various causes. We would always vote them down. Not because we didn’t support the causes (most of us did – grad students notoriously lean left haha), but because we drew our fees from all the grad students at the university with no way for them to opt out of the collection of those fees. Basically, we were in a position where we could forcibly collect money from students and assign them at will. It would have been a terrible precedent to abuse that power, as it was a surefire way to cause the grad students to revolt against the mandatory fees. So we had to say no. And every time we said no, there was outrage – the campus newspaper would make us out to be heartless power hungry monsters or whatever.

      I think, in the end, this is a somewhat similar situation. If things are mandatory, you have to include all causes. And inevitably some players will protest and opt out. And the outrage news story will happen every time. You’re right that, in the end, this may end up being better. You’ll have individual players still supporting causes, and becoming mouthpieces for the change they want to see, without forced organizational participation.

      At the Winnipeg Pride rally, a few weeks ago, someone was holding a sign: “If you’re here because you were forced to be, you are part of the problem.”