Firstly, an apology.
I've been less active on the boards than usual. University is coming to a close for the year and I've been heavily involved in a competition being run by Optus, Australia's second largest telecommunications company, in their search for a music journalist. If you'd like to, you can give me a helping hand to win the dang thang by signing my petition at
Max's Music Blog : Optus Sound Scribe
I'd like to talk today about enculturation. It's a word that refers to the process by which the individual acquires values and behaviors by learning what the culture deems is valuable. Learn by experience, lead by example etcetera. Now, think about that in the context of what we've seen around the message board in the past fortnight.
For the most part, I've seen a lot of complaining. A whole lot of fed up, unsatisfied Rams fans who are past the point of caring about 'almost' wins and moral victories. Fans who want us to win now and to win big.
It's because losing is a part of our culture as Rams fans at the moment. Naturally, when you're losing, the instinctual reaction is to fight it with everything you have in a last ditch effort to stay above water. I get that. I understand that a whole lot of you can't stomach yet another Rams loss. So you fight it because it's enculturated; you do stupid things like blaming it all on the kicker and the rookie QB. Who's next? Long Snapper Chris Massey? Boy howdy, doesn't he need to go.
Point is, when you're this accustomed to losing, there's a threshold you cross where placing blame on the kicker just
makes sense. Partly, it's because you can't make the age old argument that we don't have a WR corps. Partly, it's because the defense has played pretty well the past two weeks. Mostly, it's just because we lost. Inexplicably, to a bad team, by less than a TD. Two weeks in a row. Two very winnable games. Somehow, we just lost. Ryan fumbles away a sure TD, Brown misses the FG, and you get the feeling that losing is enculturated in the Rams' locker room too. So you, as fans, go out and laud the kicker for not making the play: not because you're intolerant, impatient people, but because you're just sick and tired of losing.
But at some point, you need to take a look in the old, cracked mirror. At what point does it become acceptable to say that Sam Bradford needs to do more than he already has done two games into his NFL career? Or; failing that, at what point do you become the same old, sorry ass Rams Fan you were last season?
Because it's absolutely ludicrous that some of you are turning a blind eye to progress. Yes. I'm aware. Goose egg in the W's column. Well done. We have a roster with one holdover from the Martz era, and another two or three from the Linehan era. At best, there are seven guys who have been with this team for more than two seasons. Jackson, Long, Ryan, OJ, Bartell, Bell, Jones. We now have...
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