The old joke used to be that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged. The increasing lawlessness of American athletes has a lot of liberals reconsidering their willingness to excuse outrageous behavior as simply an inevitable byproduct of poverty, or worse, as an alternative culture that has a validity of its own. Player representatives to the NFL Players Association—the players’ union—have asked the organization to crack down on players involved in criminal behavior, and Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander, a liberal himself, writes about the increasing mood of disenchantment with wealthy young thugs making trouble in public. Violence seems to break out all too often where prominent athletes gather, in recent years, and the incidence is clearly rising. Telander has had enough, and he senses that many others who hold liberal views like him are coming to feel the same way, realizing that the behavior of these wealthy, privileged thugs reflects a horrible reality of life in American neighborhoods: I sense a change in the air. I sense for the first time that Americans — black, white, brown — have had enough of the nonsense from the sports and entertainment world, enough of the thuggery and violence

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