Fight Song

I'm worried.  This is no surprise to those who know me well.  It's pretty much my personal status quo.

But now I'm really worried--not about stuff like where the dog is, or if my kids are hanging in, or if I'll get everything done before Thanksgiving.  I've moved on to big ticket items, like the future of humanity.

Any given minute of any given twenty-four hour period, it only takes a flick of the TV dial or a speedy on-line check to find ample room for concern about our collective moral health, and then it's one quick-n-easy slide to obsessive middle-of-the-night fear for the future.  Most days I am able to attain a fairly healthy balance of being aware without becoming obsessed (made possible by strict, highly controlled, pointedly limited access to any news outlet, regardless of political agenda).

The last twenty-four hours have made it impossible to ignore or to deny--all of us should be engaged in some serious middle of the night worrying and some fairly intense soul searching.  Our global family is sick and we need a global intervention--now.

Full disclosure:  I love football.  This fact surprised even me, since it only took me about thirty-five years to figure out the most basic elements of the sport.  I came to love it because some dedicated men took their time to teach a motley bunch of ragtag little boys.  They taught them the finer points of a good tackle and the intricate workings of offensive plays college athletes would struggle to
master--and they taught them the absolute necessity of becoming good men.

Those were happy days.  My son worked hard.  The coaches worked hard.  The fans cheered hard.  And the boys played hard.  Every single person affiliated with that team walked away from the experience richer for having had it, whether or not football remained in his or her future.

Sport and the love of sport is a fantastic form of communal communication.  We come together in our gear, we cheer the same cheers, we love the same athletes, we adore the same coaches.  But like anything done in a group, all too often we willingly forfeit our ability to think critically for ourselves.  We willfully and rapidly make a judgment about another person based upon the color of the jersey or the logo on the cap.  Sport has become the Church of the Common Denominator, operating under the same rigid, separatist rules one can find in the most rigid, fundamentalist of creeds.

And heinous deeds are being committed in the name of Sport.

At this point details have almost become immaterial.  All we need know is adults, most if not all of them men, failed young boys who trusted them.  Boys much like my son's teammates, some of whom were also "at risk" and in dire need of love.  Those same adults have apparently, for several years, been able to avoid facing what those young boys will never be able to forget:  the awful depravity of a grown man unable and unwilling to control his most primitive, pervertedly bestial drive.

Now other young men are rioting in the streets, destroying property and chanting, all in the name of what?  All in support of whom?  A mascot and a jersey.  A communal Saturday afternoon experience that has worth, yes, but at what cost?  Is it worth one's ability to think, to discern, to decide for oneself? That's a huge price to pay for a fight song.

Behind every shot of Joe Pa waving from his front porch, under every red, white and blue banner, crouched in the dark shadows cast by every single bleacher, are the rigid, terrified faces of at least eight little boys.    Faces much like those I knew and loved, faces we all have known and loved, faces every single one of those kids screaming in the streets once were.

That's what this is all about--those children.  It's a tough lesson in growing up for those college students who love their school, but getting an education is all about lessons such as this, a lesson dearly bought and paid for by eight scared little boys.  We should all take their painful and very personal sacrifice and put it to work, not by pushing over lamp posts and knocking over news vans, but by working together to keep children safe.  By assuming adult responsibilities in an increasingly frightening world--a world where grown-ups should never, under any circumstance, use the power of age and stature to take advantage of the weak.

That would be something to cheer about.