An article published by the CBC considers the Super Bowl and comes to a gloomy conclusion on what the event shows us about human nature.
The article, titled “Super Bowl, super football follies,” claims that “the Super Bowl represents humanity at its worst,” charging it with encouraging everything from bad habits to illegal activity.
Some of the charges are serious, as the article cites evidence that drunk driving spikes on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s also a day associated with injury, as overzealous fans get carried away in their excitement.
More unsettling is the spike in sex traffic related to an influx of visiting fans, with a Reuters report estimating that thousands of underage girls will be moved into Texas.
Other charges are less dramatic. The article claims the Super Bowl encourages gluttony. Super Bowl Sunday is the second biggest day of food consumption, behind Thanksgiving. Pizza chains claim that the day of the Super Bowl is one of the busiest of the year. The article also suggests that the Superbowl incites greed—pointing to the astronomical ticket prices charged by scalpers, which can go as high as $5,000 a ticket.
While the issues raised in the CBC story are unsettling, it’s hard to take the article’s claims seriously.
None of the problems in question arise solely out of the Super Bowl itself, but are simply exacerbated by it and by any other number of popular events, sport-related and otherwise. Any entertainment spectacle encourages self-indulgent and excessive behaviour.
Most of the issues in question are matters of free choice—you can’t stop people from eating too much, getting excited about sports, or scalping tickets at an outrageous mark-up.
The concerns about prostitution are different. Hopefully, recognizing a pattern of human trafficking will help authorities crack down as hard as possible.
It’s hard to see what the goal of the article is, especially as its final accusation, that the Super Bowl encourages “shameless cross-promotion,” is the most obtuse of all.
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