Our culture of outrage thrives in the absence of nuance in our public discourse
Salena Zito
LOWER ALLEN TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania — Two years ago, the booster club for the Cedar Cliff Colts High School football team in this Cumberland County town came under fire for a fundraising raffle. A handful of locals were angry mostly because of a social-media post spread by one mother, complaining that of the ten prizes offered, five of them were guns.
It was also implied that the school district condoned this.
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The guns were not offered to children, nor was it a fundraiser supported by the school district. Booster clubs across the country are parent-led volunteer organizations not under the control of the school programs for which they help raise funds for new equipment.
However, because nuance is dead in our culture and few people read beyond a headline or a Facebook posting, the idea that children were being exposed to guns — with a couple of postings suggesting the guns were being offered to children — those false tales became the story in the local news for days.
In the end, the Cedar Creek booster club raised over $27,000 for that fundraiser, which was more than half of the $50,000 budget needed every year to provide the players with practice jerseys, team meals, and uniforms. This is a community and a district that is not swimming in wealth, so those small things are a big deal for these kids.
Last year, because of all of the controversy surrounding the raffle, the parent volunteers thought they might try a different approach to raise money for all three of the football teams they support at the high school and did a straight-up cash prize of $500 for their big super fundraiser for the year. Alas, they raised only raised $9,000 and found out that the nature of the prize really matters to the community.
So the booster club parents are back again this year with a gun raffle.
It is important to note that the kids don’t sell the raffle tickets. The parents sell them in a district that spans New Cumberland Borough, Lower Allen Township, and a small portion of Fairview Township in York County, almost all small, quintessential working-class boroughs in Central Pennsylvania.
These are places where the houses often crowd close to each other, where hunting is a way to put food on the table, and where, when the football team is playing on Friday nights in the fall, the stands are full, and school spirit is the cultural touchstone.
And, like clockwork, when the booster club put the raffle on Facebook, the comments of those who failed to read the details spread to neighborhood Facebook pages, reflecting complete falsehoods. Here were just some of the posts: The school is doing a gun raffle? People associated with children are doing a gun raffle? You’re giving guns to children? And in the age of school shootings, you’re going to put guns into our community?”
These led to more outraged posts, which of course, led to more misinformation.
We live in a society that has lost all ability to think straight when reacting to something they don’t agree with. Even worse, we’ve lost the ability to digest context or explore nuance; we just react. A lot.
In short, nearly all public conversations around things like guns — or insert any other cultural issues that bend brains — show that we live in an age where we struggle profoundly with digesting positions that are foreign or different from ours. That’s why, for example, the first reaction by those who know little about how guns are used to feed and protect millions of families across this country is to ban them.
It is remarkable to watch this pattern repeat itself every day, no matter what the subject is. All it takes is for one person’s reason to vanish while pointing to a tragic story to justify his position. People will use one story as proof their position is morally superior. Within seconds they often draw other like-minded people into the arena and surround an issue or a person with a frenzied mob.
Years ago, it would have been considered intellectually vulgar for nuanced discourse to lose its place in our culture and our politics. Today, though, that’s the norm in any discussion: We don’t read the whole story or, worse yet, the whole story offering both sides of what happened isn’t even written. We rarely consider counterarguments, and nuance has died.
This year’s super raffle will be held on July 13,
and for the kids’ sake, we should all hope it is successful. Wouldn’t it be great if we celebrated the fact that parents in this district and districts across the country take the time to volunteer for these booster clubs?
Since the beginning of the pandemic and continuing through the effects of inflation, booster clubs across this country have struggled to raise funds for student-athletes in all sports. The initial lack of home games meant no revenue from local businesses sponsoring teams or banners, even as donations have dried up because of tightening family budgets.
That’s why finding creative ways that speak to the communities they serve has been the lifeblood of many of the booster programs.
Gun ownership here is the norm, not the exception, so it makes sense to offer them as prizes.
It would also be great if we celebrated the fact that the parents who did this fundraiser did it by the book. The details are written on the raffle ticket: Nobody under 21 can win; the winner must pass all background checks and must pick up the gun from the licensed gun shop owner who made the donation.
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It would also be great if we celebrated volunteerism — an attribute in this country that is also declining. United States Census data collected between 2019 and 2021 showed that formal volunteering rates dropped in every demographic group, with rate drops among women substantially larger (8 percentage points) than men (5 percentage points), although women continued to volunteer at a higher rate.
That vacuum of civic engagement has a widely negative effect on the nation’s social fabric. We should encourage civic engagement, not turn it into the outrage of the day.