OUR VIEW: Spare the rod, spoil the child?

It’s been pretty tough to be a public relations official for the NFL in the past week or so.

There’s so much going wrong there that even the most adamant supporter of the league is having a hard time defending some of the actions that have taken place.

We’re not here to rehash the details of the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson incidents. That can easily be done with five minutes on Google or by combing ESPN’s website.

But we are here to talk about the bigger, deeper issue that is in play in both instances – the fact that we have a real-to-life violence problem in our country.

Domestic abuse is awful. What Ray Rice was seen on video doing is a disgusting act that no human should ever even think to commit on another.

His suspension from the league is warranted and should have been greater than two games from the start.

Likewise, the photos from the Adrian Peterson situation are gruesome, and it’s so difficult for most normal people to even envision the act of striking a child to the point where bloodl is drawn.

Peterson will get his day in court, and he is innocent until proven guilty. But both of the above-stated cases show that we have a long way to go in terms of violence and our tolerance to situations of the sort.

We are far too accepting of humans injuring other humans. There are far too many apologists out there who are trying to justify the actions of Rice and Peterson and state that they are being profiled because they are athletes.

Truth is, they are being critiqued and judged because they are citizens who should be held to the same standards and laws as anyone else in our country.

What these two young men allegedly did is wrong – there’s no other way to put it.

To try and justify it all just puts another Band-Aid on the scar that is the wound of domestic violence in our country.

How many times can we rip that Band-Aid off before we realize the wound will never heal until the problem is treated seriously?

When will we see that our society’s lack of anger toward anger is, in fact, one of the biggest roots of the problem?