VIDEOS ARE WORTH MORE THAN A 1000 WORDS!

So we have the highly covered Raymell "Ray" Rice debacle with his fiance and now wife, the former Janay Palmer.  Rice was a running back for the Baltimore Raven's football team in the National Football League. Once he ran for 412 yrds in A SINGLE high school football game!*  We all saw the video by security cameras of Rice dragging his fiance out of an elevator.  He is a nice looking young man.  It is hard to believe he hit his future wife, but he said he did and profusely apologized and said he would work on doing better.  Apparently she believed him, and they still got married.  But he is going to have to rewire a part of his brain, just as stroke victims have to do to make up for the lost part of the brain due to the stroke.  Let's hope his violence button is not hard wired.

Now if you are a young athlete of talent, you are coddled starting in childhood.  Who knows how many thefts, drunk driving and speeding violations, assaults, date rapes, etc. they are let off of because they are a rising athletic talent?  I don't know, but I have to wish that this violence was Rice's first offense, but probably wasn't.

So he was given a two game suspension.**  People and the media were not happy with this but, well, sort of accepted it.  Then after a couple of weeks the video appeared showing him actually hitting his fiance twice and knocking her out.  Now we all knew he knocked his wife out, but once the media and the people actually saw the blurry video, they thought he should be out of the NFL, maybe forever, and in the aftermath he was given an indefinite suspension to replace the two game suspension.  Well, who knows, in the end, this may be good for the two of them.

If Rice is smart he will devote his year of suspension to addressing the question of domestic violence.  Some will never forgive him, but Christians like a redemption story.   So this is a story that will unfold over the coming year.  Rice's wife hopes people will let them alone to work this thing out by themselves, although there are those that think she should ditch the bum.  And before this is over, the commissioner of the NFL may have to resign.  I don't know about the coach of the Ravens.

As for me, I learned long ago that a lot of people, maybe most, live messy lives, and I have to just accept that (I'm not sure mine has been all that clean, either.).  The fewer details I know, the better.  I don't know about you, but I have this sneaking desire to know what it was that pushed his button.  Did she say, "You are going to eat broccoli for dinner whether you like it or not." or "I've been sleeping with your best friend."  I have this secret wish to know but can resist it.  I don't want to know.

But and even BIGGER bigger story involves videos, that I have not seen, of an apparently Islamic British subject beheading a couple of Americans in front of a war weary nation unless we stop bothering ISIS.  Well, if anyone really thought that beheading Americans would cause them to withdraw from attacks on ISIS, they were badly mistaken, and the polls show Americans are ready for a new war.  We don't understand Muslims and no doubt they don't understand us.  If they wanted to suck America into a new war, they couldn't have done anything better.  Our peace President affirmed that in a speech last night (September 10).

Yes, tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year in automobile accidents and many times that are victims of life changing injuries.  Around ten thousand people every year die from gun related murders and even more from gun related suicides.  We accept these without question.  But a death from beheading motivates us.  In fact any death from terrorism motivates us - even one.

Of course there are those who want to relive our exit from Iraq as being the cause of ISIS, but we left 10,000 to 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and the Taliban recovered strongly.  Personally, I doubt if it would have made much difference.  But the fact is " Here we are" just as "here we are." was the case when candidate Obama became President.  So it is war again.  What more can you say about a country that treasures a game of war - football.  It is difficult being on top.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Rice
** Note added 12 September 2014: The two game suspension for domestic violence was actually more severe than normal, which is to do nothing, but then there was the video of him dragging his then fiance out of an elevator.  For example, defensive end Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers actually has been convicted of domestic violence and received NO penalty from the NFL.  Hardy is appealing the conviction.  Then there is defensive tackle Ray MacDonald of the San Francisco 49ers who is was arrested for "felony suspicion of domestic abuse" with his pregnant fiance who had bruises on her arm and is still playing. (http://thinkprogress.org/sports/2014/09/09/3565086/here-are-the-two-other-domestic-violence-cases-facing-nfl-players-right-now/)