Tim Tebow is back in the news, and the reaction says more about us than it does about him.
The former quarterback, who once seemed to occupy every screen in the country, has resurfaced in a story that has people arguing all over again about faith, fame, and what we owe the people we build up and tear down.
For a few dizzying years, Tebow was everywhere.
He won a playoff game in Denver with a style that coaches hated and fans adored.
He knelt on one knee, and a gesture became a cultural battleground.
Then the NFL moved on, as it always does, and the country found new things to fight about.
What's striking now is how quickly we discarded him.
We seemed almost embarrassed that we'd ever cared.
That's a strange thing for a society to do to a person it once plastered on billboards.
It suggests our enthusiasm was never really about him at all.
We elevate someone to impossible heights, demand they represent our values, then punish them when they turn out to be a human being with limits.
We did it to child stars, to athletes, to politicians.
The machine needs a new idol every season, and it needs a fallen one too.
The deeper problem is what this does to the rest of us.
When we treat public figures as disposable, we teach ourselves that people are only worth attention while they're winning.
That logic bleeds into ordinary life, into workplaces, families, and neighborhoods, where loyalty now feels optional and everyone is one bad quarter away from being written off.
There's also something uncomfortable about how we mock earnestness.
Tebow was sincere in a way that made people cringe.
We've become a country that rewards irony and punishes conviction, then wonders why so few people seem to believe in anything anymore.
Maybe the real story isn't that he keeps coming back.
It's that we keep needing someone to lift up and knock down.
The cycle is exhausting, and it's corrosive.
A society that can't let a man simply be decent without turning him into a symbol or a punchline has lost something it won't easily get back.
We'll either show a little grace or we'll do what we always do.
The choice, as usual, is ours, and it reveals exactly who we've become. **Our take:** We built Tim Tebow into a monument and then got annoyed that he was still standing there.
If we can't handle a sincerely decent person without demanding he be a hero or a failure, the collapse isn't coming for our institutions first.
Final Thoughts
It's already here, in how we treat each other.