When the Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field on Monday night, I was watching a cartoon with my 3-year-old son. When that ended, my son began playing with magnets on the floor, and I switched over to the game. Instead of football, I witnessed a frantic scene. A “routine football hit”—just like the thousands I had been involved in as a professional player—had left a 24-year-old man lying motionless on the grass, an EMT’s hands clasped above his sternum, trying to save his life.

Nearly nine minutes of CPR happened on that field as Hamlin’s teammates circled him and watched. The look on their faces told the real story: They believed they were watching their brother die—something most football players never consider as a possibility. An injury? Sure, we’ve all seen plenty of them. But not a fatality. It was shocking. So, frankly, was the fact that the NFL adjourned the game. The game always goes on.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Damar Hamlin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxer’s gold]

Once, I was knocked momentarily unconscious in a nationally televised game. The trainer rushed out, and I came to while he was still holding my head and neck. I knew the cameras would be on me, so I moved my arms and legs around to let my mother know that I wasn’t paralyzed. I’m fine, Ma! No biggie!

Neither of my parents was wild about me pursuing football. When I was in middle school, they made a rule that I couldn’t play until high school, hoping that I’d lose interest. No such luck. I was already a head-over-heels football devotee. I had heroes. I collected football players’ cards. I watched every game. I read the sports page. I had the hats, the starter jackets, the jerseys. And I reveled in the mythology of the tough-guy football player who was willing to risk it all. Ronnie Lott, a safety for my beloved San Francisco 49ers, was given the choice of a season-ending finger surgery or finger amputation. He told them to cut it off. That’s how much football meant to him. Oh, how I longed to be involved with something that meant that much to me.

As soon as freshman year rolled around, I signed up, and the blood began to flow immediately. First from blisters and welts, then from gashes. It became clear after one day of football practice that pain would be a constant. Every play involved an action that caused an inflammatory process in my body. Bang. Crack. Smack. Hard plastic helmets with metal face masks sinking into supple flesh and bone. Crack.

“That doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Of course not!”

Pretending not to be hurt is the norm. You just hit me as hard as you could, and guess what? It didn’t hurt! Half of football is enduring pain. The other half is inflicting it. But as a prepubescent freshman with no football experience, I was absorbing more than I was dishing out. One late-fall day at practice, I chased a pass across the middle of the field and was cracked in the temple by a pubescent sophomore. I crumpled to the ground and just lay there for a few minutes before being helped to the sideline. It must have taken me too long to get there.

“Hurry up, Jackson!” Coach yelled. “We’re burning daylight!”

I watched the rest of that practice and sat out the next week—clearly, in retrospect, concussed. But everyone else kept playing. The game always goes on.

A few years later, when I was a starting safety on varsity, the opposing quarterback was hit so hard by our linebacker, and at such a unique angle, that his chin strap snapped and his face mask was pushed through his upper lip into his mouth. He came to rest at my feet, spitting out chunks of flesh and teeth. An ambulance came onto the field and loaded him in, then drove off the field and out a side gate. It was driving along the other side of the fence, not yet out of sight, when the opposing team’s offense broke the huddle and stepped to the line of scrimmage. The game always goes on.

I played in college: more injuries. I played in the NFL: more injuries. In 2007, as a tight end for the Denver Broncos, I watched the Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett collapse to the ground after another “routine football hit.” He had a fracture and dislocation in his cervical spine. “He looks dead,” my teammate said to me, half-joking, the both of us believing, as we all did, that although we were risking injury, no one was going to die out there.

Everett was on that field for about 15 minutes before he was finally loaded in an ambulance and taken away. His departure elicited a powerful ovation from the crowd, but as soon as that ambulance disappeared into the tunnel, the anticipatory murmur returned to the at-capacity crowd. Those spectators were there for a reason. The whistle blew and the game resumed. The game always goes on—with or without you.

Never was this more clear than when my career ended for good. When all of the contusions, blisters, torn muscles, dislocated fingers, separated shoulders, and cracked ribs were healed. When no one was coming to hurt me anymore. When doctors no longer stood in a circle to watch me work, waiting for me to drop. When I no longer had to be my best. When I became just like everyone else—watching the fight from the sidelines.

Of all the pain I had endured on the football field, nothing hurt as bad as watching the game go on without me.

[Mark Leibovich: The dark pageant of the NFL]

That 2007 Broncos helmet sits on a shelf at my house. There are three stickers on the back: No. 81, that’s me. No. 29—that was my teammate Damien Nash, who died that off-season after collapsing at a charity basketball game at his old high school. And No. 27—that was my teammate Darrent Williams, who also died that off-season, in the wee hours of New Year’s morning, shot dead in a stretch limo. The Broncos let us keep our helmets at the end of every season. I’ve given most of them away, but this one is special to me.

There’s another sticker on that helmet, too. It’s small, rectangular. It appears on every football helmet in America—high school, college, and professional. It reads:

WARNING: No helmet can prevent serious head or neck injuries a player might receive while participating in football. Do not use this helmet to butt, ram or spear an opposing player. This is in violation of the football rules and such use can result in severe head or neck injuries, paralysis, or death to you and possible injury to your opponent.

No one ever pointed that sticker out to me. It’s small enough to miss, so I never actually read it until I was done playing. My son surely doesn’t read it when he asks me to put the helmet on his head. He’ll stagger around under its weight, giggling, blissfully unaware of what I’ve done in that helmet and what’s been done to me.

As the ESPN broadcasters struggled in the unscripted aftermath of Damar Hamlin’s injury, I struggled with a question of my own. When people ask me if I’ll let my son play football, I always say: “We’ll see what he’s good at. I want him to pursue his interests.” Because what kind of father would keep his child from chasing his dreams?

But seeing the heartbroken faces of Hamlin’s teammates, who, 15 minutes prior, were living out their own dreams as professional football players; and seeing Hamlin himself—a beloved teammate, a model of hard work, and only 24 years old—laid out on the field, fighting to survive a “routine football hit,” I had to ask myself: Would a good father let his son play a game that always goes on?

Just four days after his stunning on-field cardiac arrest, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin is breathing on his own and speaking to family, physicians and teammates -- positive updates that Bills players say will bolster them in this weekend's matchup against the New England Patriots.

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On the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, Joe Biden decorated Americans for courage during the unrest, while on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives remained in limbo as many of the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election bickered over electing a speaker.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Tipping is weird now. The GOP is a battering ram against the truth. Damar Hamlin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxers’ gold A Slow Democratic Recovery

President Biden today decorated 14 Americans with the Presidential Citizens Medal, an honor established by President Richard Nixon in 1969 to recognize any citizen of the United States who has “performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens.” There are, I am sure, people on the right who will roll their eyes at honoring a Democrat such as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, or a Republican such as the former Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers (whose long political career ended with censure and a primary defeat from his own party). Likewise, the Capitol Police officers and the election officials who will be honored have already been the target of harassment and threats; their medals cannot make them whole now. Nor can such a posthumous honor restore Officer Brian Sicknick to life. (Sicknick’s family yesterday filed a wrongful-death suit against former President Donald Trump and two of the January 6 rioters.)

These American citizens are all, in fact, heroes. They took risks—not only politically but also by enduring physical threats from unhinged conspiracists—to protect our democracy. It’s easy to forget just how much danger these people were in, and how narrowly we escaped even greater chaos. Imagine what America would look like today if some of the people being honored by Biden had been intimidated or defeated, or if they’d just lost their nerve.

I reached out to Rosa Brooks today to explore that question. Brooks is one of the scholars who convened a group of experts and partisan operatives in late 2020 to game out the “worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential elections.” She and her colleagues attracted a lot of snippy criticism at the time, but the events of January 6, 2021, proved their prescience. When I asked about her view of the worst that could have happened on that day, her scenario was chilling: She believes that had the rioters caught Vice President Mike Pence, or perhaps some members of Congress—such as the Democrats trapped in the House gallery at the time—they may well have been beaten or killed. “We know what happened to the police officers caught by the mob,” she told me. “Imagine if the mob had caught members of Congress.”

From there, Brooks suggested, more violence might have erupted, with more deaths. With Pence perhaps missing or incommunicado, there would have been no way to certify Biden’s victory, and Trump would have attempted to impose martial law.

Brooks’s most disheartening conclusion was that we escaped this disastrous possible outcome only by sheer luck. “I don’t think some sort of resilience in our system prevented that,” she said. “It wasn’t the supposed ‘guardrails of democracy’ that kept things from getting that bad—it was chance, plain and simple.”

I agree. We might be glad Pence stood firm at a key moment, but Pence had to be free—indeed, alive—to act. We might also comfort ourselves knowing that the clowns and opportunists who tried to overthrow our constitutional order have been outed by a thorough investigation in Congress. We can hope that justice is served, with prison sentences for some of the most dangerous seditionists and violent rioters. But is it enough? As the Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn tweeted this morning: “730 days later. We’re still waiting on accountability.”

Too many of the most important figures in the January 6 plot—and, as we know from the House investigation, it was indeed a plot, and not some random outbreak of violence—have escaped true accountability. From Trump on down to the group that the Washington Post writer Greg Sargent calls the “coup lawyers,” including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, we know their names. But severe consequences for such people have been rare.

Meanwhile, most of the Republicans who voted to overturn the election are still in Congress—or would be, if the House could get organized enough to swear them in. (At a ceremony at the Capitol today to mark the anniversary of the insurrection, only one Republican, apparently, bothered to show up.) The White House event to honor those who defended democracy took place at the same time that Representative Kevin McCarthy, just down the street at the Capitol, submitted himself for another few rounds of political bastinado, as the House, for the 12th and 13th times, failed to elect a speaker.

The anniversary of January 6 should remind us that the crisis of American democracy isn’t over, and that we should continue to take seriously what a close call we had in January 2021. (Exhibit A: Twitter’s new boss, the deeply unserious Elon Musk, trollishly chose today to reinstate the account of the disgraced Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, the man who wanted the military to seize voting machines.)

I have been somewhat optimistic about America’s democratic recovery in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections, and I actually think the contest over the speaker’s job is an example of democracy in action. But we should not lose sight of the ugly reality that the people opposing McCarthy have not done so out of principle or because of policy differences. The “rebels” are members of a caucus of extremists who will be part of the new majority, and whose serial humiliations of the gentleman from California will grant them concessions in the House that will continue to endanger the stability of our system of government. Or, as my colleague David Frum put it yesterday, McCarthy is on the “verge of selling out the country to a nihilist faction so he can briefly occupy a now-powerless office—then cash in for whatever he can get after this fiasco.”

It is fitting that we remember the heroes of January 6, including the many people who weren’t at the White House that day but who stayed at their posts and did their jobs as election officials, volunteers, observers, and many other of the tasks that allow the millions of citizens of a giant federal democracy to govern themselves. But the events today on Capitol Hill and the ceremony at the White House are reminders that the threats to our constitutional order have not vanished, and that we cannot magically wish them away.

Related:

​​January 6 is a dangerous shorthand. (From June) ​​Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning. Today’s News Kevin McCarthy lost his 13th vote for House speaker, but he did move 15 GOP holdouts into his camp after making some concessions. A new report showed that the U.S. economy added 223,000 new jobs in December, making 2022 one of the best years on record for jobs growth. Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who suffered cardiac arrest during Monday’s game, had his breathing tube removed overnight and is talking. Dispatches Books Briefing: A new year doesn’t call for a new you, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read (Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship

By Lauren LeBlanc

Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”

In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Women Talking, Sarah Polley’s new film (in theaters), makes a conversation feel epic.

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Listen. On our podcast Radio Atlantic, Marina Koren discusses our strange new era of space travel.

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P.S.

In much of the Eastern Orthodox Christian world (Russia and Ukraine, for example), today is Christmas. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a Christmas cease-fire, but within hours of the arrival of the holiday, air-raid sirens blared over Kyiv, and CNN reported artillery exchanges at the front lines near Bakhmut. Perhaps the most insulting aspect of the Russian declaration is that it ostensibly came at the behest of the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, who has been a vocal and especially bloody-minded supporter of the war.

In the meantime, you may wonder why some Orthodox celebrate Christmas in January. Not all Orthodox do this; I am Greek Orthodox, and we follow the Western tradition of celebrating on December 25. The simple answer is that the Christian world broke apart into its Eastern and Western camps in the 11th century, and when Pope Gregory XIII standardized a new calendar in the 16th century, the Eastern churches decided to stay with the old “Julian” calendar, in which Christmas falls on January 6. There’s no particular theological significance there, especially because no one really knows the exact date of Christ’s birth. Now, as to why Orthodox and Western Easter fall on different dates … that’s a little more complicated, and I’ll get back to you on that in a few months.

— Tom

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.