David McElroy

I’m sick of people begging me to be offended at something they’ve imagined to be offensive. I’m suffering from “outrage overload” because so many people seem so eager to tell me I should be offended at an ever-growing list of things.

Here are two recent things that have me banging me head against the wall in frustration with the pathetic folks of the Fellowship of the Offended.

First, a black gymnast named Gabby Douglas won a gold medal at the Olympics and NBC’s Bob Costas had a segment about her being the first black winner of the all-around. Then the network went to a commercial break, which happened to start with a promo for a new NBC comedy called “Animal Practice,” about life at a vet clinic. The commercial imagines a monkey who lives at the clinic seeing himself (herself?) winning an Olympic medal. (See the video at the end of this article.)

The promotion had been running regularly throughout the Olympics as a tie between the show and the games. But because it happened to run after a black woman won a gold medal, well, you know the rest. The ad was clearly racist — and NBC was forced to apologize. (See this article for some of the outraged tweets about it.)

When I told someone the story Sunday night and asked for her reaction, she almost shouted her reply: “Tell these people to get a life!”

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Note: None of the links in this article are active anymore. The dead links remain only as pointers to where the sources originally were back in 2012.

In the battle of the Chick-fil-A boycott, a lot of people came off looking pretty bad this past week — on both sides of the issue. The guy who probably came out worse than anyone is Adam Smith, the Tucson, Ariz., man who drove through a Chick-fil-A drive-through just to record video of an employee while he verbally attacked her.

If Smith is the one who looks the worst — a bully who was fired over his behavior — the one who looked the best for the entire week was Rachel, the young woman he verbally assaulted. Even though Smith was being rude and confrontational, this young woman was polite, firm and composed. After he told her, “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here,” she didn’t attack. She didn’t get angry.

Instead, Rachel said, “I hope you have a really nice day….”

I’m a lot older than Rachel, but I don’t know if I could have handled it as well as she did. When someone is attacking me — especially for something I have no control over — I sometimes get angry and I want to strike back. Rachel’s example is a better way. It’s not indicative of weakness. It’s indicative of strength to be able to have self-control and remain polite and loving. Many of the people who claimed to be Christians supporting Chick-fil-A this past week would have done well to remember that lesson, both in this case and in the rest of life.

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Meet Nate Davis. He’s such a devoted fan of the University of Alabama’s football team that he’s covered roughly 70 percent of his upper body (so far) with tattoos attesting to his love of a school and a football team. Because of his fanaticism, he’s made himself a laughingstock to many people who consider him crazy or weird. But he doesn’t care, because he ultimately seems more dedicated to Alabama football than anything else in life.

I started thinking about Davis Friday evening because of an 8-minute ESPN film I’d seen earlier in the day. The short film deals with people around the country who have taken their love of various sports teams to the graves. They’ve been buried in team jerseys and caskets bearing the logos of the teams they cheered for. One man even had his funeral with his body propped up in a recliner, with a television showing Pittsburgh Steelers football games. (You can watch the short film at the end of this article.)

Are these people crazy?

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