Be reel: Concussion

A Frightening Reality

Who doesn't love football on a Sunday afternoon?  Families gather together to cheer on their favorite teams.  Food, families, friends and football go hand in hand during the fall months.  Fathers and sons team up as coach and player in little league as they dream of, one day, making it big on field.  Being a professional athlete infiltrates the dreams of the majority of the youth in America today.  With the marketing of apparel, equipment, ticket sales, other accessories, and more, the NFL rakes in billions of dollars annually.  At a certain point, the NFL chose profits over players health, as revealed in the movie Concussion.

Dr. Bennett Omalu, played by the talented Will Smith, is a forensic pathologist who determines the cause of death in cadavers.  His success is attributed to the way he meticulously connects and examines each case.  After the shocking death of NFL Hall of Famer, Mike Webster, Omalu is the one who investigates the cause of death.  After performing Mike Webster's autopsy, he famously states that "cardiac arrest may be how he died but not why."  This leads to the discovery of a condition that is caused by repeated blows, characteristic of football players, to the head called CTE.  As Omalu fights to bring awareness to the public, he faces tremendous opposition from the NFL and all those who fear losing their favorite past-time as they know it.   Omalu soon finds out just how costly it can be to challenge one of the most powerful institutions in the world; the NFL. 

Concussion uncovers the very real potential of how profits can be prioritized over a person's well-being.  Our society has placed so much effort on the accumulation of wealth, that it risks being blinded to all things ethical.  This movie should raise our awareness to how greedy pursuits corrupt morals.  We must ask ourselves "what we are willing to sacrifice for the sake of gaining wealth?"   The NFL was willing to ignore the dangers imposed on the players week after week.  They went through great efforts to cover up any evidence of CTE.  But as karma would have it, the truth will always prevail.  Unfortunately, it cost more players their lives before the truth finally surfaced and could no longer be ignored.  May we not make the same mistake again.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYxzI3IXmP8