Chicken Soup with Cory Petero.

Cory Petero is not a terrorist, but his story helps explain why America is such a violent place.

For those of you who don't recognize the name, Cory Petero was the assistant football coach who tackled a 13 year old player named Brian Wood during a Pop Warner game in 2006. Here's a link to the story. You can see a video of Brian Wood trying to injure the coach's son after the end of play along with an interview by Ann Curry of the Today Show. And you can read more by searching for "Cory Petero" and "Brian Wood."

At the time there was a considerable degree of outrage, but the criminal behavior of Brian Wood and Cory Petero's reaction to it at a Pop Warner football game at Stagg High School on Saturday, September 2, 2006 should have surprised no one. Six and a half years after Columbine, bad parents still didn't get it.

Football is not a game. It never was. Football is a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that looks upon badly injured children as just so much collateral damage, just an unfortunate side effect of doing business. It prioritizes the physical safety of players, including children, only when the monetary cost of insurance and law suits imposes a unifying motive upon the entire industry. And only the most naive parents allow their children to participate based upon the empty rhetoric of sportsmanship, character-building, and personal development. Your child is little more than raw material.

When children are signed up for competitive athletics, they enter a machine that turns out a product of enormous economic value to its owners: professional entertainers. The operation of this machine resembles that of a mining operation where a colossal amount of material is blasted and dug out of the ground in order to produce a proportionately tiny amount of finished product. Both operations leave enormous piles of tailings in their wake and both have a long history of being messy, dangerous to participants, and corrupt.

In football the filtering and disposal of less promising candidates follows a time-tested and widely accepted routine. The first few seasons appear to be conducted as promised; athletics is treated as a game where ideals like fun, fairness, and sportsmanship are openly promoted. This helps to maintain a pleasant illusion for the benefit of recruiting new players. When the players reach the age of 12 or 13, not coincidentally when they’re just bumping into the front edge of puberty, the situation changes considerably. There is little emphasis on having fun and increasing pressure to win regardless of the consequences. Anyone who finds this situation uncomfortable or for any other reason simply falls out of favor is urged to find something else to do. If such an individual does not choose to leave on his own, various methods of encouragement are imposed upon him, one of the most physically dangerous of which was demonstrated by 13-year-old Brian Wood and recorded on videotape during the game in question.

When a play ends, each individual tends to relax and return to his side of the line. This is when a player is most vulnerable to physical injury and Brian Wood obviously new it. The “late hit” that was witnessed by what is certainly by now an audience of millions was an intentional act intended to cause a great deal of physical pain to the victim and to intimidate him.

Leave now or this will happen again, and again, and again.

The fact that the victim could have been badly injured, crippled, or killed obviously means nothing to Brian Wood, his adult role models, or to the entertainment industry as a whole. If his parents raised him to be a bully, he may have committed the act on his own accord just to acquire a sense of power, or he may have done it after learning that his victim had fallen out of favor with the coaches or the other players. Whatever the motive, it was not an accident. Brian Wood is a fairly typical sociopath of the gridiron and the American public loves him for it.

Terrorists can sleep soundly knowing that millions of Americans place more value on the outcome of a Pop Warner football game than they do on the lives and safety of their neighbor's children.