‘If I die, I die.’ QB Kirk Cousins shames Vikings, NFL with cavalier comments on pandemic | Opinion
“If I die, I die.”
Kirk Cousins said that. The Minnesota Vikings quarterback. The team captain. The highest-paid player in the NFL.
He appeared on a podcast in July in an interview that just aired this week, and host Kyle Brandt was talking with Cousins about the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, and how concerned the quarterback was.
How concerned was he on a scale of 1 to 10, if 1 represented “Masks are stupid”?
Cousins said, “I’m about a .000001,” later allowing he only wore a protective mask himself to be “respectful to other people” (mighty magnanimous of him) and because his league’s protocols mandated it.
The COVID-19 death toll in the United States surpassed another grim milestone Thursday morning. It was then 190,014. It is more as you read this.
It isn’t right to just round off that number because those 14 most recent victims matter as much as any. That was 14 more families that had to say goodbye from behind a glass pane because it was too dangerous to hold their loved one’s hand at the very end.
“If I die, I die.”
I wondered if, in the company of any of those 14 families, Cousins might have offered his credo as a condolence? As his version of empathy?
The quarterback also mentions he takes a “survival of the fittest approach” to the pandemic. Not sure if he’s a herd-immunity guy or just going all Darwinian on us, but someone needs to alert Kirk that the fittest among us die too, along with young adults. And children, too.
“If I get it, I’m going to ride it out,” Cousins said. “I’m going to let nature do its course.”
The athlete’s cavalier lack of concern that has struck so many as callous might be explained by this elaboration:
“I trust the Lord to handle things.”
Hmm. Well, I might suggest the Lord doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of handling things these days — except I don’t want to offend anybody. So instead I will just say that, I don’t know about your Lord, but my Lord is wearing a mask because he’s trying to protect his flock from an earth-bound plague, not one that can be wished away by prayer or belief.
As whenever anyone says anything that creates controversy, there is the inevitable “clarification.”
Might be a writer who Tweets something suggesting racial injustice protesters are “America bashing.”
Might be a quarterback who casually says of a pandemic, “If I die, I die.”
Cousins’ clarification, like most, fell short. His needed to say, “I recognize that what I said came off as insensitive,” but it did not.
As a footnote, the pandemic that doesn’t concern Cousins all that much has shut down most of college football in 2020 and led his own Vikings to not allow any fans for at least the first two home games.
Oh, and Eric Sugarman and his entire family tested positive for COVID-19. He is the infection control officer for the Minnesota Vikings.
We see all the time that some folks are science-deniers who see having to wear a mask as an infringement on their freedom instead of a necessary public service. Often we see those folks as enraged Walmart shoppers railing at employees and lunging at the person recording them.
It isn’t often that the person who is “a .000001” on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of the importance of wearing a mask is a quarterback and one of the faces of the NFL.
Team captains lead.
Kirk Cousins just failed colossally at that.
