Especially when they are awesome NFL quarterbacks

I think when Michael Vick gets out of jail (where he is presumed to be heading when he pleads guilty on Monday to gambling/dog abuse charges) the NFL should let him play again. There are many reasons that I will go through, but the biggest reason is that he is awesome at football.

Now I know some of the allegations are awful – the dog fighting, the murder/executions of losing dogs, the doggie rape chambers, but let’s put this in perspective. Perhaps the dogs would not want to go on living with missing jaws and eyes. I know many people who would rather be dead than be left in a vegetative state and I am sure that dogs are no different (and for the record Don Bluth was right – all dogs do go to Heaven so I am sure they are better off). Furthermore, Saddam Hussein ran human rape chambers and it took us like 20 years and a war of false pretext to get him. It took the feds like 6 months to nail Vick to the wall.

And recently I was subjected to a 13 minute video from PETA by my girlfriend on the horrors and abuses of the various meat industries. What these animals are subjected to is atrocious and all of us who enjoy steak or hot dogs are complicit in it. I will probably not stop eating steak and chicken and hot dogs (well maybe hot dogs), but I would push for more humane treatment of the animals in the way they live and are killed. However, corporate America would never allow that because it would eat into profits and too many people in this country don’t give a fu-k to make corporations change. And most young people today will treat you like a loser if you speak passionately about the environment

So we deal with it and a small percentage of the population like my girlfriend, Alec Baldwin and Russell Simmons swear off meat, while the vast majority decide to look the other way or say that this is acceptable torture of animals. But then we jump at the chance to condemn a celebrity who is doing awful things to dogs for sport. I personally think hunting is stupid and barbaric in 2007 and I think the same of Ultimate Fighting competitions. What Michael Vick was doing was simply a combination of the two. I think it is terrible, but I feel the outcry over the treatment of animals in the Vick case does not require any real self examination of our behaviors in general. It is easy to point at Vick and call him a monster, but wide scale animal slaughter and massive environmental destruction by corporations, as well as by us as individuals, is ok because to change that would take too much personal sacrifice.

But the real reason I am against banning Vick from the NFL is because he is an awesome football player. Warren Moon beat his wife, OJ Simpson wrote a crude book about hypothetical murder, etc. The list of NFL offenders is long, but it may be a guy who ran dog fights that faces a lifetime ban. Are they not aware of how electrifying a player Michael Vick is? At some point he was going to become the first quarterback with 4,000 yards passing, 1,000 yards rushing in the same season (I think he’d be the first). I think in this life we give second chances to lots of people for superficial reasons. Bad men because they are rich, bad women because they are beautiful, bad kids because they’re yours. I think we can cut Vick some slack as well. He should still be punished, but that’s no reason to punish the NFL fan as well.

Oh, and by the way there is an unjust war going on where almost 4,000 American humans have died. Woof!