If liberals “drink the Kool-Aid,” my
conservative family too often runs with the herd, parroting the words and challenges coming
down from our Right Wing Media. Most of
the time, this is not a problem, but occasionally, the truth winds up being a casualty. Let me
give you an example of how this works:
There is a report,
this morning, that reveals the
fact that the NFL’s “pink campaign” only gives 3.5% of the money it
collects, to breast cancer
research, while other organizations in
this field, give as much as 91% of its
proceeds. I could make this sound very
bad, a “pox,” if you will, on the NFL and Big Money.
But the full story may help to ease the criticism. Understand that this is “Cancer Awareness
Month,” and the NFL is the run-away
leader in raising awareness for this disease.
The actual benefit coming from the NFL is amended in a good way by the
fact that its televised and broadcast awareness campaign, costing the NFL millions is not billions, raises the level of concern and increases
collective contribution across the board and for all organizations raising
money for cancer research, whether they
are associated with the NFL campaign or not.
In fact, with this in
mind, it is most difficult for me, as a citizen journalist, to disparage the NFL when their “contribution”
needs to be measured in terms of the abstract. While increased “awareness” is a fact, the source of that awareness as a quantitative
reality, is almost impossible to
fix.
Point
of this post: Information
is requisite to an informed and free society.
Partisan rhetoric gives us a sense of direction and is “good” for that
reason, but, can be over-played when it comes to an
assessment of true social value involving endeavors that might come from “outside”
our partisan world.
