Michael Vick's American Dream

There have been numerous things written about Michael Vick ever since the dog fighting scandal broke. That being said, there are very few that match up to the one published today by Andrew Sharp. To anyone who has looked down upon Vick for his past actions, this article puts everything into an amazing perspective and if you are still down on him and/or the Eagles organization for signing him, hopefully this new perspective will change how you feel and make you finally understand the other side. Here is a very small snippet with a link to the full article at the bottom.

Our understanding of animals is relative.

So that judging dogfighting has nothing to do with how you value the life of a dog. It's about sociology, and understanding that in different places, different animals mean different things. For someone like me, who grew up with two dogs and projected human qualities on them for my entire life, dogfighting is unimaginable. The thought of using them for sport and disposing of them afterward... It produces a physical shiver.

But if I'd grown up in a place where dogfighting was a regular occurrence, I suspect I'd feel that sensitivity would disappear. In the same way I see a cow and have no idea what to do or how to interact, but a midwestern farmer sees a cow and knows to feed it and care for it, so that one day that cow can be sold and brutally slaughtered.

We understand animals differently, and for someone like Vick, dogfighting wasn't foreign and barbaric. It's a disturbing notion, and indeed, the culture of dogfighting indicates a callous, ignorant slice of society. But it's ignorance, not evil. And for all the rhetoric we've heard about Vick's inhumanity and inhumanity of his crimes, it's sort of ass backwards.

Ultimately, demonizing Michael Vick demands a willful disregard for understanding humans. How we behave, and why in some places, that behavior deviates from the accepted norms of a sophisticated society. Dogs aren't meant to be fought, we say.

But in backwater Virginia, clearly, nobody got the memo about respecting animal rights. And a few hundred miles away, on the racetracks in Kentucky, they're still racing horses every weekend, euthanizing the ones that pull up lame. So wait a second: Who sets the standard? Why don't all these angry sportswriters have a problem with the Kentucky Derby?

I'm not advocating dogfighting here, but horse racing's mentioned as an instructive example. If we're going to talk about Vick's crimes, it's a conversation that requires a far more nuanced outlook than most of us are ready to dedicate to this.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF ANDREW SHARP'S ARTICLE!

Ed. Note.: I am hosting the NFL Week 3 live blog on Sunday. I will also be hosting a Mets-Phillies live blog tomorrow night if and only if the Nationals defeat the Braves earlier in the afternoon. Should that happen, then the Phillies will be a win away from clinching their 4th straight NL East pennant.