From Facebook fails to loving your teams

Sometimes a company just has a bad stretch. Consider Facebook over the past few days. Yesterday the entire site (along with Instagram and What's App) was down for hours.

A whistle blower blew the lid off the secretive company's philosophy and goals. Congressional committees are asking a mix of tough and just odd questions of the company's executives, and it is clear that our ancient representatives don't really know how the web works. 

Facebook's stock dropped five percent in a day on Wall Street, which translates to a $6 billion loss for Mark Zuckerberg, at least on paper.

Facebook had to go on Twitter to reassure customers and billions of people desperate to get their news... or something.

The Republic did not fall.

Bonus fun fact: the whistleblower who appeared on "60 Minutes" with her criticisms of Facebook is from Iowa City, where I lived my first half-century. That means very little in terms of the news but does remind me of how small the world can be sometimes.

And THAT reminded me of how prone we can be to tribalism, even nonsensical group associations. Iowa City's Kinnick Stadium will be the site of Saturday's "game of the century" as the Hawks host Penn State in a battle between the #3 and #4 teams in the country. I am an Iowa fan and have been since infancy.

I had season tickets to Iowa football games for many years and never missed a home game, no matter how bad the team was. In fact, Iowa had a losing record for 17 consecutive years over the 1960s and 70s and I STILL cheered for the occasional upset and grumbled about bad calls or lucky/unlucky plays that kept us from greatness.

I was also a Cubs fan, so at some point it became almost a point of pride that I kept rooting for not one but TWO perpetually losing teams. Nothing could convince me to swap my affections to, for instance, Ohio State and the Yankees, despite knowing I would experience more of the joy of victory with those teams.

I was thinking that the anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers are in much the same mindset as I was 40 years ago. They are sticking with their "team" no matter what, and there is no logic or motivation that will shake that loyalty.

Iowa got better in the late 1970s and has remained a top program. National television has allowed me to continue my lifelong love of the Hawkeyes. The Cubs eventually won the World Series, though the bad times have returned to Wrigley. 

But now I live in Denver and it is difficult to NOT root for our thoroughly mediocre Rockies. Some guys just can't resist the allure of the lovable losers, I guess.