I'm Afraid of Americans

So, I have been wanting to write about this for almost a week now, but I keep forgetting! Last Saturday Tiffany and I went to a training walk. It was scheduled to start at 7am, but we thought we would get there at 6:15 and get a few extra miles in before the others got there. It was a game day, but we figured that since the game didn't start until 5:30pm, if we got there at 6am we'd be gone before the crowd got there. Apparently we are completely out of the loop!

When I got there at 6:10am, our usual parking lot was PACKED! People had already set up tents all over campus! The sun wasn't even up yet!!! It was crazy! By the time we found a place to park, it was after 6:30, so we didn't get much of a head start! After we started walking around campus, seeing more and more tents and cars, people parked on sidewalks and lawns, almost exclusively driving red SUVs, I noticed something really strange. Some people had satelites!!!! They had generators powering TVs hooked up to satelites. These were people WITHOUT TICKETS!!! People who came 10-12 hours before game time, to park on the lawn, set up a tent, and watch the game ON TV!!!!! This is by far the most absurd thing I have ever seen!! Well, wait, there was also the fact that all these people were drinking already!

It really was quite a spectacle. I mean I've seen the gameday traffic. It is crazy, but I never knew how early it started. By the time we left, around 11am, all the parking lots were packed with cars and tents and alcoholics. I went home, took a shower, talked to my mom, ate lunch, did some of my homework (read about 100 pages), and went grocery shopping....all before the game started. While hundreds of people sat on campus, drank, and held onto their prime parking space that they got before the sun came up, and that they will be stuck in for a few hours after the game because of the post-game traffic.

There was at least one fatality that night: a 20 year-old boy who was a passenger in a pick-up truck that crashed about half-a-mile from my house. They never officially said that drunk driving was involved, but I think in this town, on game day, it may be assumed.

This whole phenomenon really terrifies me. Not to mention the amount of money people spend on all these endeavors. And I wondered, how many of those people had spent the past week talking about the tragedy in New Orleans and how awful it was; and then thought nothing of dropping hundreds of dollars to see a football game. If all the money that had been spent on that game (tickets, gas, hotels, food, alcohol, parking, etc.) had been gathered and donated to the Red Cross, we probably could have beat Walmart out for top donation. Scary.