Keller @ Large: Enough Bitter, Jealous Whining
By Jon Keller, WBZ-TV
BOSTON (CBS) - The NFL continues to act out its bizarre obsession with the Patriots, relentlessly hunting for non-existent evidence of wrongdoing.
The latest episodes include sweeping the visitors locker room at Gillette Stadium for surveillance devices (there weren't any) and the interrogation of three Patriots employees on the sidelines to determine if they were engaged in nefarious activity (they weren't).
Add those onto the ten-month-long waste of time and money I am hereby rechristening Stupidgate, and you have a disturbing pattern of behavior that at its core stems from one of the seven deadly sins – envy.
It's obvious by now that this is being driven by a number of other team owners who just can't get over the fact that the Pats have been more successful than they have. The course of this season, in which Coach Belichick and his crew have made a special point of rubbing the also-rans' noses in their superiority, appears to have exacerbated their insanity.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
And football isn't the only part of life where we see this pathology in action.
The politics of envy is especially in vogue these days. If you won an election or made a lot of money, you must have cheated and don't deserve your success.
We used to talk about equal opportunity, and even named government agencies after it; now all the talk is about income inequality, a very different concept.
It's human nature, I suppose. You could say the same about the other six deadly sins.
But I bet we'd be a whole lot better off as a culture if we acknowledged the fact that some people are just better at what they do than others, and take it as a challenge to improve, rather than an excuse for bitter, jealous whining.