Super Bowl's Importance to Society

I usually have a hard time getting into major sporting events, with some exceptions for the World Cup and Clemson football. But here's a reason why the Super Bowl may be good for national cohesion:

There is nothing else in the country today that can act as a common language between the boardroom and the bingo hall, the classroom and the union hall. Sports, and most importantly talking about sports, is the only activity just about all Americans share regardless of age, education, or wealth. When the electrician shows up at the doctor's house they can always talk about one of the local teams. This is not as often the case in other countries where interest in sports is closely associated with class.

You can follow the drama in as much detail as you would like. Deep or shallow, this passion unifies us and keeps us from trying other worse ways to unify:

And this is right, because as Tocqueville warned, the passion for equality can produce the most desperate inequality. The passion for equality and the passion of envy are remarkably similar, and in our zeal to obtain equality we’ll blindly give up other goods. In the extreme, we will give up freedom, preferring to be equally subject to one power and safe from being proved inferior to another than free to exercise our unequal abilities.

I'll be specifically watching to see how the eyes of the world influence individual decisions.