Toronto Maple Leafs: A Series of Thoughts On Rage and Negativity
By James Tanner
Rage and Empathy and the Toronto Maple Leafs
Why is the first reaction always rage and never empathy?
Yeah they’re pros, but they’re also people. Ultimately, they’re millionaires who play a game for a living, so I don’t really expect people to hold hands and sing kumbaya, but personally, I don’t see the point of being so negative all the time.
A goal is scored, instantly it’s “who do we blame.”
After a loss, it’s all about awarding the goat horns.
I don’t even go on twitter anymore during games, because if I wanted to listen to people bicker with each other, I’d re-watch that garbage Fast and Furious spin off with the Rock and Jason Statham.
It seems to me that every single thing about hockey is negative these days. If it’s not who sucks, and how much they suck, and who deserves how much blame, it’s all about who said something stupid and how stupid it was and how much an idiot that person is.
It’s honestly exhausting.
Making it worse is that any kind of effort to explain things rationally is met with insane rage. A player was injured. Who cares? Real Men get it done! A lucky bounce cost the team a win. Who cares? Only losers mention luck. And on and on in the most toxically masculine way imaginable. I shudder to think what the kind of abuse I take on the internet would do to someone who actually had feelings.
I personally watch the Toronto Maple Leafs to be entertained, and because it gives me something unimportant and fun to engage in. Somewhere along the line the internet ruined this. Instant publication of your thoughts isn’t good for anyone. People have become so used to getting what they want when they want it, and so used to complaining about it when they don’t get it, that we’ve all just mostly tuned out anyone or anything that stands in the way of our instant gratification….and god help anyone who doesn’t agree with us.
And what happens when you tune out anyone who questions your beliefs? You start to think anyone who does must be crazy. You become insanely confident in your own ideas and insult anyone who doesn’t agree with you, which you don’t feel bad about because you barely consider them human, and it’s usually done anonymously and poorly, like you’re not very good at it because you’ve never tried it in real life. Think it won’t happen to you? If you’ve ever responded to an opinion you disagree with by trying to come up with a hypothetical motivation for why the person said what they said, it’s already happened.