Anderson: We're better off participating, as those we watch on TV remind us

For many years on opening day of pheasant season, my friends and I brought a football with us. This was in addition to our guns, shells and dogs, and we tossed the old pigskin to kill time. Sometimes this occurred while we waited for shooting to begin. On other occasions, at lunchtime, with a few roosters laid on a truck tailgate, someone would spiral the football to someone else on a haphazard corner route, hunting boots weighing everyone down and Labradors in fast pursuit. Two-bit fun, with leaves changing color.

Then one glorious October Saturday, the guy who owned the football went on injured reserve. I can't recall exactly how he separated his shoulder. I do know we had killed a pile of birds and were splayed out on picnic tables at a Dairy Queen, doubling down on banana-hot fudge malts and chocolate sundaes.

"Go out," the ball owner had said, and one of us took a deep post pattern, faking out garbage cans en route. But the ball never came. That was it. His shoulder was gone. We haven't thrown a ball much on pheasant openers in the years since.

I was reminded of this the other evening when a friend called to talk. This guy has been around and knows a few things. He could have gone on and on about the Mideast, about Janet Yellen and her interest rates, or about Ebola and how everyone rolls the dice, day-to-day.

Instead the topic was ducks in prairie Canada, and how, soon, they'll congeal and migrate, with cool Arctic air descending. Also he wondered whether I had seen many deer around the farm, whether I knew that next month he would be headed west to hunt elk, and what I thought the pheasant opener might look like, birdwise.

Finally, he said, "Too bad about Adrian Peterson." And that was that, just a brief mention, and the conversation was over.

By contrast, the general public's fixation with the turmoil enveloping the Vikings and their star running back has been more prolonged and intense, by orders of magnitude — an outgrowth of the rise of urban America's observer culture, and its corollary, the decline of the participant citizen.

Case in point: As the nation's cities have grown, and its overall population has increased, national park visitorship has declined. So, too, the number of people who paddle the boundary waters, as well as those who fish and hunt.

Instead of these traditional pastimes, with their well-documented mental-health benefits, we, most of us today, arranged in cities as we are, seem content enough in our free time to observe other people doing something.

Exactly what the other people do, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, doesn't seem to matter.

Maybe it's run with a football, or dunk a basketball. But we're equally happy to watch people "survive," sing well or badly, build motorcycles, kick-box, repossess airplanes or debate the relative merits of bachelors or bachelorettes.

All the while, excitement builds for the all-too-predictable implosion of our highlighted hotshots, for which, thanks to television, we, each of us, occupy front-row seats.

So it goes in these times, and among the beneficiaries are politicians, whose worst fear should be that the proletariat someday marches on Washington with torches, demanding a healthy environment, or, shudder at the thought, term limits.

The list of what we, the citizenry, could be concerned about, and achieve, is endless.

But through the fog of our distractions, the NFL chief among them, we can barely grasp the questions of our time, let alone the answers.

Some things haven't changed. We're all riding a fireball to somewhere. The difference today is that most of us are blindfolded for the trip, and willfully so.

I hope everything turns out OK for the Vikings and all those involved.

Instead, I'm far better off paddling a canoe, hiking a trail, casting a line, pitching a tent or walking a pheasant field.

Tossing a football can be a good idea, too.

But be careful. The guy faking out the Dairy Queen garbage cans might run too deep, and you'll throw out a shoulder.