Let’s keep Damar Hamlin’s injury out of the culture wars, shall we? | Opinion

It says something — and not something good — about the times we live in, as people try to stretch Damar Hamlin’s life-threatening football injury to fit their polarizing political agendas.

If you consume any sort of news or sports at all, then you know about Hamlin, a defensive back for the Buffalo Bills, who suffered an episode of cardiac arrest on the field and national television a week ago, after making a tackle in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Most of the news of the past week has been about his ongoing recovery — he’s awake, alert, regained the ability to breathe on his own and can communicate with the world outside his hospital room. Which is very good news indeed.

This week, every NFL game contained a moment where fans were invited to cheer for the 24-year-old player as he continues to fight his way back.

And there have been well-deserved plaudits to the emergency medical personnel at the game who kept him alive with CPR and got his heart beating again via the modern miracle of portable defibrillation devices.

But some people just can’t leave it there.

I don’t know about you, but the more political people in my social media feeds have been having a field day with this.

Anti-vaxxers took their best shot, trying to claim that Hamlin’s heart stopped because of the COVID-19 vaccine (95% of NFL players have had the jab).

Experts scoff at that and rightly so. The Associated Press fact-checked and found it false.

The fact is that sudden cardiac episodes happen in sports. It’s actually the No. 1 cause of death among athletes under 25 — Hamlin’s 24 — and most cases are from previously undiagnosed hereditary heart defects.

Tests are ongoing on Hamlin, but given the circumstances, experts think what probably what happened to him is a rare occurrence called “commotio cardis,” a blow to the chest at precisely the right instant to disrupt the heart’s rhythm.

Although football is a violent sport, commotio cardis in football is exceedingly rare. It’s actually far more common in the nonviolent sport of baseball, when players take a sharply hit ball to the chest.

In Hamlin’s case, the COVID-vaccine conspiracy theory faded pretty fast after a brief airing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show — not in small part because the people pushing it are so out there that they blame the vaccine for everything from the demise of the dinosaurs to the Milky Way’s eventual collision with the Andromeda galaxy.

But into the breach stepped the culture warriors.

Left-leaning ones draw a tangent to Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who was essentially drummed out of professional football for taking a knee during the National Anthem in protest of police violence. A typical example is a meme posing the question: “So now the NFL is OK with players kneeling on the field?”

Meanwhile, folks on the right are invoking former Broncos and Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, who had a habit of dropping to one knee and praying whenever something went right for him on the field. It sparked a brief (and mocking) cultural phenomenon known as “Tebowing,” which involved taking a knee when everybody around you was doing something else. The counter to the Kaepernick meme is: “And just like that, the NFL was OK with prayer on the field again.”

Both sides are just wrong.

If you can’t discern the difference between Kaepernick’s protest and Tebow’s proselytizing, versus kneeling on the field in prayer and respect for a player with a life-threatening injury, you probably just shouldn’t say anything at all.

You’re not helping make sports safer for the players. You’re certainly not helping Damar Hamlin get better.

You may get some likes from like-minded individuals, but you’re not helping your cause, be it anti-vaccination, anti-racism or public prayer.

You’re just being jerks.