Sports are not an escape from reality.

For some of us, sports provide a nice, pleasant distraction that allows us to forget about everything that ails us. When we are in the middle of watching or playing sports, the whole world seems to drift away and suddenly things like politics, work drama, family drama and the various other complications of your life no longer matter.

But we can’t be like this. We can’t shut out the world when we face controversy, it is so easy to tunnel into our little hidey-holes and forget that people are suffering: but they are.

There’s a stereotype in America that everyone that loves football is either a redneck or someone related to or friends with a redneck. First off, that’s not true. Not everyone who watches or plays football is a conservative christian (and there is nothing wrong with being such), so not everyone on your favorite football team has the same political views as you. Just because everything is all “God, family and football”, doesn’t mean they are always going to stand for the national anthem.

Athletes often have to live under a microscope. We prevent them from leading normal lives because we view them as celebrities that we need to focus on at all times.Athletes shouldn’t have to be the victims of this perpetual escapism. We place them under the pressures of media every single day; we look to them to be perfect. The pressure of having to make your life wonderful is not the responsibility of these athletes.

So don’t use sports as an escape. Use it as a pleasant distraction every now and then, but don’t let it control your life. Don’t let your obsession with a player’s life, on and off the field, ruin your own life because you don’t want to accept everything that is happening in the world.

We can love sports while having different values, but we shouldn’t try to shut those values out all the time. Free speech is free for everyone and everyone is free to live their own lives, even athletes. So we should be free, we should love sports just as much as we love and respect each other.