Re: Party time. Front Page, June 17, 2019.
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
The recent Raptor’s rapture over the NBA championship speaks volumes about how our social values have changed in the past fifty years under capitalism. Millionof Raptor fanatics skipped work and school to attend the Raptor’s games with their outrageous ticket prices. They bought a ton of expensive swag” and spent gadzillions more on food, drink and lodgings making the corporations that fund them fabulously wealthy. Stars celebrated, the mayor donned a Cherryish jacket and fans packed Jurassic Parks across Canada and along the parade route like good capitalist consumers. Kawhi Leonard is the newly anointed Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on a large bus. The NBA final was an economic boon to Toronto and the NBA not fans. It was a celebration not only of the Raptors but of consumerism, materialism and hedonism. There was zero long-term benefits to the adoring fans.
What is most disturbing about this is the complete lack of critical and self-
awareness of the hyper-bigotry of this spectacle and its patriarchal nature. This is in the majority a big-money male event like most professional sports.. The poor and even the middle class who cannot afford this spectacle need not attend.
If just 1% of these rapturous Raptor fans had turned out to protest with the same enthusiasm the Ford government’s disgusting and regressive social service cuts, corrupt casinos laundering money for off-shore crime-lords, the rich hiding money in tax havens, the corruption in Ottawa reflected in the SNC Lavalin scandal and the ship procurement contracts and the lack of action on indigenous issues to name only a few I might be able to swallow all the media fawning over the Raptors and Kawhi. Instead we are witness to the change in the values of society where the new religion of capitalist consumerism and materialism has so infected society to such a degree that there is no protest over the previous matters only a celebration of the excesses of capitalism and entertainment. It rings like Nero in
Roman times. When this is over all the “fans” can go back to their stripped down, crappy, low-paid contract work with no pensions, healthcare or decent wages and save for the next Raptor win.
The difference between my hippie generation of the 1960s and their children, the millennials of 2019 is that the latter have drank the Kool-Aid. In the 60s young people were energized and protested by the hundreds of thousands regularly against governments for civil and human rights, abortion; rights, an end to the Vietnam war and the impeachment of a corrupt President. They died fighting for these valuable causes as did their leaders like John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They were fighting for real causes that mattered not a team that has won a championship. It was a time of a political awakening not a superficial one. They fought to deliver a society that was fair and democratic and yet we find a society in 2019 bereft of political conscience and sensitivity and drugged by an excesses of materialism and media to the point that only sports and entertainment matter or are acknowledged. We learned that democracy is a fight that must be fought over and over again in a patriarchal society. We are a society in decline and a shadow of our former selves. Millennials are only allowed to have a social conscience for the Raptors, the Leafs and other entertainment icons not real causes that matter and that might change the balance of power and lead to real change. We have lost our way. C’est dommage.