Every single person I know who did football in high school, without exception, has a chronic injury. Many regret what it's done to their knees and back, even major organs like the brain.
There is no serious legislative push to ban high school football.
Also, like, if you want to talk about social pressure on minors to undertake activities that will result in regrettable, irreversible damage to their bodies:
No one, *ever*, tried to persuade me to transition.
My gym teacher tried to persuade me to try out for the football team almost every single day that I was in junior high.
#i firmly believe that the reason why concussions and brain damage in general#are not taken nearly as seriously as they should be#is because of football#if we take concussions and brain trauma seriously then we have to acknowledge the risks that children are undertaking at even#high school level football#but we can't do that#because the kids need to play football in high school so they can play football in college so they can join the NFL#This time I'm really gonna queue it.
Not a single one of my wife's fingers is completely straight. If you look at them closely -- which I have, many times, over the past 22 years -- you can see where they were broken, over and over, taped in place, and where she just kept fucking playing.
When I first met her, she used to joke about how her coach said, "I could get more than that out of a pig if I kicked it hard enough," and that was the nicest fucking thing he said. Two decades later, she's like, "Yeah, that man verbally and physically abused all of us for years."
There is at least one football game she played in high school that she simply doesn't remember, because she was a linebacker. She got a concussion. She got up and kept playing... or so she's told. She doesn't remember, because she had a fucking concussion and they let her keep playing.
I hate football so much. It ruined her back, her knees, fucked up her hands... everyone was so obsessed with how tall she was, how broad-shouldered. No one ever pushed her to transition, but I fucking wish someone had at least suggested it. That would have hurt her so much less than FUCKING FOOTBALL. Like, it would have been actually beneficial to her.
I heard that one of the actual reasons that organizations like the NFL have tried so hard to downplay CTE and other injuries like it is because they’re terrified that moms will refuse to let their children play football anymore and that entire massive industry will come collapsing down because of it.
That fucking scans.
