The wild world of sports and politics rarely collide, but they did so last week when two assistant coaches in the NFL lost their jobs because they refused to get the vaccine. One of them was former Houston Texans assistant Rick Dennison.

The NFL can’t fire players for refusing to get the vaccine because they have a collective bargaining agreement that bars such action, but you can believe if a player is on the bubble and refused to get the shot, he will likely be out on the street. While the league is not barring players from performing, they are highly incentivizing getting the vaccine.

If a player tests positive without getting the vaccine it could cause his team to forfeit a game. If that happens then no one on either team will get their paycheck. Money is always a great motivator and when you are talking as much as one million dollars in the form of a game check you better believe there will be peer pressure.

However, this is where we get to the point of asking how we even got here in the first place. There are people that are incapable of getting vaccines. They might suffer an allergic reaction or they have some other medical reason why they cannot. While I question it, there are also folks that have a religious objection. I’m not talking about these folks.

Other countries have both sets of folks within their borders and yet have found a way to get more than 70 percent of people 12 and older vaccinated. The U.S. isn’t quite to 50 percent. It is that gap that threatens to keep the virus going through the next several years. It is a merry band of idiots that are either questioning the safety of the vaccine or the efficacy of the vaccine. Then again, I don’t think they are using big words like efficacy.

At the heart of this debate are the rights of the individual and how far they extend. Everyone has the right to be a dumbass up until the exercising of their rights interfere with my safety. We’ve done this for years. Students have to have certain vaccinations by certain dates to be able to attend school. I’m not sure why COVID is so different.

I’m not sure why we have to be so stupid about this. In the past several months, the Texas Education Agency has decided to not fund virtual learning, but students under 12 can’t get vaccinated. Then, you have only 50 percent of those eligible getting vaccinated. If just one of those facts were mitigated somehow we would be okay. Yet, here we are stuck on freedumb. You can’t force me to do a solid for my neighbors and my community.

A party that is supposedly dedicated to life seems to be treating everyone’s life cavalierly. The irony if palpable. We made everyone get the polio vaccine and we eradicated it from the face of the earth. We did the same with small pox. We currently require measles and mumps vaccinations. They’ve even added one for chicken pox. I’m still struggling to understand why this is so difficult.

Governor Abbott, who is slimier than a bucket of snails, has called a special session of the Texas legislature. It is well within his right to do – as a Texas Governor can call a special session for any reason she wishes just so long as she states a reason. In this case, he has outlined 13 reasons that are so important that the Republican majority legislature failed to pass them in a regular session. I suggest you wipe your rear end with that memo and read my list, because it’s a hell of a lot more honest.

Reasons for calling a special session:

1. Democrats denied the legislature a quorum, and ain’t no way the GOP is gonna accept the fact that they lost a battle. See: Trump 2020 election.
2. He wants to distract from the power grid disasters of 2021 – there is no mention of doing any legislative work on the power grid or ERCOT, despite the fact that it’s the real elephant in the room – even bigger than Allen West running for Governor.
3. Texans must perform genital checks on children playing tee-ball.
4. One-upping his Republican primary opponents Huffines and West by using state funds to build a wall. He never seemed interested in doing so until he was up for re-election against GQP candidates crazier than him.
5. He needs to dog-whistle the racist voters by using the words “Critical race theory.”
6. Make it somehow harder for brown people to vote.
7. – 13. He’s campaigning for re-election. 

We all know that Abbott called this session to rile up his base. In his list of thirteen priorities, there is not one single mention of the energy grid or ERCOT. Notably, there is no mention of vaccines or COVID-19, either, because his base is still pissed off at him for being somewhat responsible and making some businesses reduce capacity or close during a pandemic that killed 52,715 Texans as of today.

Texas Republicans don’t care if you fail at legislating so bad that thousands die unnecessarily from disease or freezing to death, they just want to make sure you can be really mean.

Abbott is doing his damnedest, isn’t he?

There’s been a lot to mourn about over the past several years. Obviously, the loss of 600,000+ Americans is on top of that list when it comes to COVID-19. Everyone has either lost someone close to them or knows someone who has. However, that’s not the type of mourning that has been on my mind. Instead, I’m mourning the loss of civility and intelligent debate that we used to have concerning complex issues.

The Texas Tribune released one of those stories that surprises no one. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, they basically said that resuming in person instruction in Texas accelerated the spread of the virus. Knock me over with a feather. That falls under the category of news that isn’t really news. It’s more the kind of common sense that seems to be a lot less common these days. When you deny science and deny logic like this you end up getting this kind of news story.

Yet, there has been something else going on this year in schools that is also impossible to deny. Failures are up. Frustration is up. It is much more difficult to teach students remotely and it is much more difficult for them to learn. Furthermore, it is also more difficult for students to enjoy school when many of their extracurricular activities have either been canceled or limited. They are not feeling the connection they need to succeed. I’m not sure how that can be replicated in a virtual environment and this is supposed to be what I’m an expert at.

This is where the mourning comes in. We used to be a people that could acknowledge both of these facts and then have a somewhat intelligent debate on how to move forward. The more heads we put together the better we usually do. We have made awesome innovations as a society so maybe someone can come up with a way to offer connection and keep people safe. Naturally, a part of that is getting as many people vaccinated as possible, but when you have people denying the jab just to own the libs it impossible to do that universally. Idiots have always been among us, but it seems we have more of them.

These are the same idiots that seem to think having more guns in society makes us safer. It seems that the police are drawing a chalk line around common sense and fewer and fewer people are able to identify the victim. It’s not that we have complex problems like those in our schools. It is that fewer and fewer people seem to want to try to tackle them. I know we are supposed to fight when the idiots try to fight culture wars instead of tackling real issues. Unfortunately, there is just an overwhelming sadness that this is where we are at.