Trigger(ed) happy

Look, I don't know what's going on right now. A fever in the brain, maybe. Viral stupidity. Lack of adult supervision, especially among the adults.

But here are a few items that have popped up in my Sportsball feeds the last few days. You tell me if there's a common weave to them all.

Item: In Vermont (as the Blob talked about yesterday), a bunch of so-called grownups brawl on the floor during a middle-school basketball game, and one of the brawlers dies.

Item: In South Bend, a high school basketball game between city rivals Washington and Riley degenerates into a wild melee that requires half the South Bend police department to quell and ends what was supposed to be Senior Night at Washington.

Item: In St. Charles, Mo., Eastern Illinois' leading scorer takes a swing at an opposing fan in the first half of an 80-67 loss to Lindenwood.

Aaaand, item: In Minneapolis, five players are ejected after a fight between Mo Bamba of the Orlando Magic and Austin Rivers of the Minnesota Timberwolves sparks yet another brawl.

None of these incidents are connected, of course. Or maybe all of them are.

Maybe they're connected because this is a country on a hair trigger these days, and it's on a hair trigger because its leaders apparently want it that way. When half of Congress is actively insane and seems to enjoy encouraging the rest of us to participate in their insanity, everyone winds up perpetually outraged. And mostly over absurdities.

So the country's either crazy or pissed off or both, and that spills over into Sportsball World. When self-control is sneered at as cowardice,  and indulging our worst impulses lifted up as some sort of half-assed virtue, how could what's happening in Vermont and Indiana and Missouri and Minnesota not be connected in some visceral way?

Once upon a time we dubbed a player or coach "Rabbit Ears" who was trigger(ed) happy, and held up he or she to unanimous ridicule. Regarded them as weak-ass punks, because that's what they were. 

In which case, there sure seems to be a lot of weak-ass punks out there these days. Including a certain ex-President of the United States, I might add.

That NBA fight in Minneapolis, for instance?

It started, Rivers said later, because "I just didn't like the way (Bamba) was talking to me" from the bench. No doubt the fan at whom Kinyon Hodges of Eastern Illinois took a swing said something Hodges didn't like, either. And you can pretty much figure the brawls in Vermont and South Bend started because someone said something someone else didn't like, and then someone threw a punch, and it escalated from there.

To which the Blob says "What are you all, five years old?”

Look, the Blob would never hold itself up as a paragon of maturity ("No kidding," says Mrs. Blob). But I got my share of nasty phone messages and emails during my columnist days. Got heckled a few times, too.

I almost never engaged, either in person or remotely. In fact, if it happened in person, I'd either chuckle or wouldn't react at all. This is because nothing drives a heckler crazier than being ignored.

So how come so many others don't seem to know that these days?

Beats me. But the other day I was texting with a friend in Vermont about that middle-school basketball brawl, and I told her about the brawl in South Bend, and she texted back this: Wow! Something is so wrong.

She's got that right.