Super Bowl Mania

Every year the Super Bowl and all that surrounds it amazes me. Men, women, old, young, any ethnicity, go nuts over this one event. Super Bowl game time is also the time that I choose to do some shopping. The stores are eerily empty of other shoppers. It’s as if they know something that I don’t...

Actually, the Super Bowl, for all its hype, is good for a couple things. One, it provides at least a couple of really funny commercials. Yes, I know they exist because, even though I don’t watch the game, I have my husband hollar at me when a worthy commercial comes on. Secondly, it distracts us from the sadness and strife in the rest of the world for a couple hours (several hours, if you include the pre-game stuff). However, to be fair, I believe that Call of Duty and Angry Birds take many people too often to distraction, then suddenly they have forgotten about everything else in the world -- Oh, the Sirens! -- but that is for another Blog...

I had this theory that crime during the Super Bowl would decrease since (statistically) most crime-causing people are men and that most men are parked in front of a TV with their buddies watching the game. When I tried to Google this phenomenon, I first hits I got claimed that 10,000 prostitutes converged on the Dallas area and that child sex rings were suspected and...Oh, argh! Cancel search.

OK, so much for that theory, but it does make me think of this. How much preparation does one do to “have” a Super Bowl party? I know that there are websites solely devoted to planning tips for the big event. Also, since realistic estimates of the number of viewers for a Super Bowl are around 100 million (way less than the billion number hype, presumably propagated by the NFL marketers), that is really a lot of people who KNOW how to prepare for something.

See where I’m going with this? Yes, of course! If a person can go to those extremes to prepare for a 3-hour event that occurs every year, surely that same person could prepare for an emergency, right? If those finely honed organization skills were diverted for just for a day or two every year to make a family disaster plan, or re-stock their emergencies supplies, or make their emergency car kit, wouldn’t we, as a community and a society, be so much more prepared when disaster hits?

Oh, yeah, Sue. It will happen. I just have to think of a really good half time show...