Professional athletes have an interesting tendency to believe in their own invincibility. They are able to accomplish things both physically and mentally that most of us are only able to dream of doing. At the highest level, they are paid massive sums of money, and are celebrated around the world. If you walk into that reality with ill-informed opinions about your power to transcend the most mundane, yet inevitable realities of life, it can lead to some really interesting… and stupid… ideas.
Exhibit A this week woould be quarterback Kirk Cousins of the Minnesota Vikings, who has some really unfortunate opinions about the coronavirus. Cousins recently appeared on Kyle Brandt’s “10 Questions” podcast on Spotify, and dude was peddling some serious snake oil. Cousins and Brandt were discussing the use of masks to prevent the spread of the virus, and to eventually help stamp out an insidious, easily-spread killer that has already taken over 180,000 lives in America alone.
Per Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, Brandt asked Cousins, “If 1 is the person who says, ‘Masks are stupid, you’re all a bunch of lemmings’ and 10 is, ‘I’m not leaving my master bathroom for the next 10 years,’ where do you land?”
“I’m not gonna call anybody stupid, for the trouble it would get me in,”Cousins replied. “But I’m about a .000001.”
Brandt asked him why, and Cousins said, “I want to respect what other people’s concerns are. For me personally, just talking no one else can get the virus, what is your concern if you could get it, I would say I’m gonna go about my daily life. If I get it, I’m gonna ride it out. I’m gonna let nature do its course. Survival-of-the-fittest kind of approach. And just say, if it knocks me out, it knocks me out. I’m going to be OK. You know, even if I die. If I die, I die. I kind of have peace about that.”
Yeah, there are several problems here.
First, the refusal to adhere to individual protocols that are absolutely proven to stem the spread of the virus is an astonishingly selfish and stupid thing to do. The evidence is both obvious and overwhelming that wearing masks does so, while refusing to wear masks and going about your daily life is an almost sure way to spread the virus and quite possibly lead to the sickness and death of more people. Unless you’re taking your cues from various politicians whose professional futures are highly reliant on people ignoring the ramifications of a disease they have proven too ignorant and incompetent to control, this is the “well, duh” statement or our time.
Second, whether Cousins believes he has radical superhero powers to combat the virus or not, he can’t possibly believe that this extends to everyone he might come into contact with, right? Can he? One assumes Cousins is going to follow protocol on the field and in meeting rooms — wearing masks, getting tested daily, and so on — because the NFL won’t let him play if he doesn’t. And because of those protocols, over the last week, the league administered 58,621 tests to a total of 8,739 players and team personnel, and there were four new confirmed positive tests among players and six new confirmed positives among other personnel. That was split with 23,279 tests administered to 2,747 players, and 35,342 tests administered to 5,992 personnel. If the NFL didn’t do this, there would be major outbreaks in most or every NFL facility and the 2020 season would not exist. Period, end of story.
Third, if Cousins is walking around the city of his choice with this belief, refusing to wear a mask like some tinfoil-hatted yobbo, he maintains a far larger likelihood of catching the virus, and spreading it as either a symptomatic or asymptomatic carrier. Kirk Cousins is a family man. He’s a famous athlete who will experience people coming up to him and asking for a few minutes of his time, and perhaps an autograph. As preposterous as the “if I die, I die” mindset is regarding his own life, it is absolutely inexcusable when it comes to the lives of others. Because when he’s saying, “If I die, I die,” he’s effectively saying, “If you die, I don’t care.”
That’s a harsh thing to say, and a harsh thing to write, but after six months of watching this virus kill thousands of people, and negatively impact the lives of every person in America to a greater or lesser degree, wiping out jobs and creating fear and sadness, to cavalierly disregard what this virus is and what it will continue to be if we are all selfish and stupid enough to ignore it? Well, that’s a bridge too far. Maybe the rest of us aren’t at peace with dying.
Tragically, there’s no known way to change this mindset except for the people who have it to experience their own deaths, or the deaths of the people closest to them. One must possess empathy — the capacity to understand and feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference and put oneself in another’s position — to understand that just because you have a “screw it, don’t do it” mindset doesn’t mean everyone else does. One must possess the ability to put logic beyond your own experience into the equation, and get the concept that just because you don’t have COVID doesn’t mean that you won’t get it.
And to whatever extent Cousins has people looking up to him and choosing to follow his example because he is a professional athlete — well, we can only hope that doesn’t lead to any more tragedy than we’re all already experiencing. Hopefully Cousins will never be a carrier of anything more than a seriously ill-informed opinion.
