Comes word that the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are joining the Southeastern Conference, primarily to take advantage of the SEC’s huge TV contract.  That will likely kick off another round of conference realignments, probably killing off another conference or 3, and, ultimately, driving another nail in the coffin of the fiction of college amateur sports.

It’s an enduring fiction, granted, but it’s been a fiction for a century at least.  With the recent Supreme Court ruling that the colleges and their syndicate, the NCAA, can’t prevent athletes from profiting from shoe deals and the like, it’s becoming a fiction more and more detached from the real world.

Is it time to bow to reality and finally admit that these kids aren’t amateurs by any rational understanding of the word?  At least in the big-money sports of football and basketball, and to a lesser extent in baseball, soccer, and maybe a couple of others?  The SEC and other top conferences are running enormously expensive and lucrative farm teams for the pros, and the smaller schools like ETSU believe they have to emulate the big school to compete, albeit with the ruinous expense but without the lucrative box office and TV contracts. 

Let the pros run their own damn farm teams, and if the kids want to use their (usually meager) earnings to get an education at the school attached to the stadium, good for them.  The rest can spend their time practicing and doing whatever else it is that virile young men and women do with their time, which for most doesn’t include getting a college degree of increasingly-questionable value.  Maybe the schools would concentrate more on their academic reputations than their athletic prowess.  Nah, that really is wishful thinking.

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The reality is that Covid-19 is an awful disease, although not because of its lethality so much as its unpredictability.  So which is it – will you be one of the 40% who doesn’t even know he’s been infected, or one of the 40% who has a cold, or one of the 10% who gets miserably sick – or one of the 10% in mortal danger?  We know in general terms who are most at risk – the fragile elderly, and those with comorbidities like obesity and cardiovascular disease – but that doesn’t account for the surprising number of healthy people who wind up barely surviving or dead.  We know that children are at low risk of getting seriously ill – but that’s not no risk.

And there’s the rub.  We humans are notoriously bad at evaluating risk.  Sure, getting the new vaccines carries a certain risk, but all the evidence shows that developing immunity the old-fashioned way (i.e., by catching the disease and surviving it) is riskier by several degrees of magnitude, and a lot more miserable.  Sure, it’s risky to resume normal activities, but it’s becoming clearer by the day that hiding in our homes, shunning human contact, carries its own set of significant (if hard-to-measure) risks ranging from children’s loss of education, with all that entails for the future, to increased deaths from suicide, drug abuse, deferred medical care for other diseases, and sheer loneliness.  Sure, masks are somewhat beneficial, but the benefit is so small that it’s not worth the bother.

So, if it were in my power, here’s the policy I would impose:  Life is risky; get over it.  Make your choices and accept the consequences, including the consequence of living with your own conscience if you screw up, and don’t even think of blaming anyone else.  Get vaccinated if you want, which, on balance, is the smart thing to do, or don’t get vaccinated, which, no offense intended, just doesn’t make sense to me.  If you get sick, stay home.  Keep one of the stupid little paper or cloth thingies in your pocket and wear it if the nervous virtue-signalers around you insist; at least you can use it to hide your derision at their superstitious belief in its power. Then, having done what you can reasonably do, get on with your life.  Or stay at home and marinate in your loneliness, getting crazier and more paranoid with each passing day, if that’s what you want.  It’s your life.   Live it any way you want, as long as you respect my right to live mine the way I want, and don’t inflict your pointless misery on me.

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And speaking of taking risks (I’m being ironic, of course).  The wife and I attended Bristol Rhythm and Roots, and, boy, is it great to hear live music again.  We tried to live as normally as possible during the pandemic, going out to eat and attending what few events there were to attend once we were vaccinated, but this is the first thing we’ve done that felt really, truly normal.  The crowds were thinner this year (you could actually walk down State Street rather than being forced to go with the flow), but everyone was having a great time.  That included the musicians, who all said they were grateful to be back in front of an audience; it means so much to them.  The audiences seconded the sentiment.  The pandemic may not be quite over yet, but these people are over the pandemic.

You may have heard that a few acts backed out.  That’s true.  Too bad.  It left bigger audiences for the ones that stayed in, and I suspect that fans and festival organizers will have long memories of those who left them in the lurch.

Roots music is well-named.  It is so deeply rooted in this region and its culture that it’s unlikely to ever disappear.  Let’s hope not.  Truth, beauty and power reach deep into the rich but rocky soil.

Nonetheless, it’s great to see the festival reaching far beyond the roots to some of the furthest branches on the great tree of American music.  Cory Wong, for example, playing high-energy, feel-good funk that’s about as far from honky-tonk cryin’-in-my-beer-’cause-my-woman-done-left-me-‘cause-I’m-a-no-good-low-down-drunk music as you can get.  Not my style, but we were surrounded by hundreds of people who frankly didn’t care about my style or lack thereof, on their feet and dancing.  Or the revelation of bare-foot cello virtuoso Dave Eggar, who played Bach and a Janis-approved rendition of “Bobbie McGee” with equal panache.  Obviously, I had missed the message, because the Paramount Theater was packed to the walls for his performance.  A man who could live anywhere (and plays with everybody who’s anybody) lives in Bristol now, and we are incredibly lucky to have a genius of his caliber among us, bare feet and all.

Well done, Bristol.  See you next year.  We already bought our tickets.

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2021