Stet Sports Blog

I once thought that Gilbert Arenas could change the world. I found his candid takes on everything from relationships to politics to rehab and free agency to be simultaneously provocative and endearing. He spoke the young-and-fun language without being drowned out by his own affluence and fame.

He was a millionaire that seemed to not know it, or didn’t care enough to truly live what being a millionaire usually prescribes.

But when the presidential campaigns began to grip the nation in the summer, Arenas responded with several ill-timed, inconceivable takes on the issues. The same guy who had thousands of kids playing Halo, buying adidas and yelling “Quality Shots!” on courts around the world, was now playing around about voting for John McCain as a financial issue, and later, not voting at all.

Or so he says he was playing around.

And it’s not that Gilbert Arenas owes anybody anything in the way of political stances. He works hard at his craft, is a liberal contributor to his community, and from all indications, lives a decent life. That’s all you can ask from anybody in this lifetime, so he doesn’t deserve criticism for his political opinions.

But Gilbert was joking around at a time and on issues no one wanted to laugh about. People really wanted change. For as much as he wants people to know that money, fame and fortune don’t forge changes in his life or perspective, he decided that politics was an off-limits topic in his regular love letters to fans. He decided that fans didn’t deserve to know his real feelings on issues that mattered to more people than just himself.

Now he tattoos his body and commissions murals to commemorate Obama’s victory. He now recognizes it as a monumental step for the country, one worthy of humble and genuine praise. The problem is that we don’t know if he’s serious or not this time, because he went out of his way to joke about it before.

Maybe politics is an uncomfortable subject for someone that needs so badly to show that his life mirrors the lives of those who buy tickets, jerseys and shoes to support him. He is desperate to present himself as the everyday working man. And if he really wanted to be that everyday working man, it would not have killed him to take a stand in either direction.

If he really wanted people to have the access he works so hard to give, he would’ve been a lot straighter about his feelings on the political direction of the country. If he could recognize that Obama was more than just a presidential candidate, surely he could’ve recognized that his opinion was more than just words.

I once thought that Gilbert Arenas could change the world, because he was so driven for the world not to change him for the worse. But now I see that even when things change around him for the better, he is just as driven to stay exactly the same.

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