The Draw Play

Before anything else, the fight continues. Here’s the page to help give justice to Breonna Taylor.  If you know of more good places to donate, petitions to sign, or black creators/voices to amplify, send me a link. I’d like to keep doing a small part like this on the posts.

—

Oh Jake. We barely knew ye, and already ye may be cut. Probably not, but if I have learned anything from 2020, you think you are through the worst and then more comes and kicks you in the nuts with a steel-toed shoe.

Bills rookie QB Jake Fromm State Farm had an unfortunate text message surface this week where he says guns should be made super expensive so that only elite white people can get them. Big yikes! Not the biggest yikes, but a solid yikes on the yikester scale. He had to make a public apology to his team and everyone else and has faced speculation on what the Bills might do to him. I doubt anything further comes of it.

I’m honestly pretty torn on it overall. To briefly play devil’s advocate, it wasn’t a tweet. He didn’t put this out for the public to see. It seems like a joke to begin with. If he tweeted this out to the public, then I’d be pretty okay with him getting raked over the coals for it, but it was a text. Sent to, presumably, a friend. You talk differently with friends. When you know and are familiar with people, your boundaries change. It doesn’t necessarily make the jokes okay, but they are done with an explicit understanding that you are saying them to a person or persons who understand exactly what your tone is, and that it is a joke. I’ve read the text exchange and it honestly could read as a joke that just didn’t land and was poorly thought out. Without knowing either person involved personally, or the relationship between them, I can’t really make a true judgement on his intention. For this reason I’m pretty okay with him not getting cut. He might just be a dipshit who thinks he’s funny.

Then again the texts are also ambiguous enough that it can also be read as not a joke. One of those situations you see online all the time. There’s an old reddit-style rage comic that pretty much perfectly exemplifies this (trigger warning, late 2000’s casual use of the R word). The classic move of a person who shares a bad opinion and when they get called on it, immediately pivots to “it was just a joke, bro! Why are you so mad at a joke?!?!” You know the type. I can very easily see that in the same text exchange. There is a decent chance Fromm actually is the kind of dipshit who holds this sort of opinion and just feels comfortable slinging it around when not explicitly in public. So far the scandal has essentially operated under the logic that it was. Probably a safe bet. A healthy one, too, as even if it was just a joke it will hopefully make Jake a bit more reluctant to use that sort of language. Especially in the current climate.

Anyway this is all a lot of speculation about a bad text. If nothing else now he’s gonna have to work to earn his forgiveness. In this case I’m happy to see him be held accountable in some capacity rather then allowing potentially shitty views to go unchallenged.

I hope Friday’s comic doesn’t have to be about more dumb people doing more racism but at this rate I anticipate another player to eat his own foot by the time I wake up.

 

Also, I just know someone is gonna ask, so here’s a high res of the one panel