War of Worlds

I don’t know how else to say this–but some people love sports to death. Whether they chose to or not, they do. Their memories, bodies, and everything in-between the physical and the spiritual are passed around like a baton from friend to friend.

We are born where we are born not because of some pick yourself up by your boot straps- work -hard and succeed fairy tale. Being born is outside our control. This is historical good or bad luck, the God of our life governing the rest of our lives.

In America death is a foreign substance. We are raised in the white-picket society, a paradigm of Pollyanna that obliterates concepts attached to pain and suffering. We live for comfort and govern our lives based upon the accruing of goods.

And goods are aplenty in America. But not so in other countries.

In South America kids grow up in a rough socio-economic atmosphere: rich or poor. 1.5% of the population live in what statistically is defined as rich in South America, and the other 98.5% learn to scrape, gnaw, and fight just to get by.

A great book says that a “three strand chord is not easily broken.” So in order to survive, the poor in South America band with friends and family like interlining fibers of a rope.

And soccer subsumes reality. For a ninety minute strap, a youngster and his friends can escape the harsh play of his or her current predicaments. Not only does the sport assume the power to reprieve the individual from the pain and suffering, but can act as a vehicle for success as well.

This vehicle of success is defined by both monetary mobility and name recognition. In the less industrial world, the organic nature of love, trust, and family bond, flower into a mafia-like circle of closeness. Freud would assume nature to be the ultimate guiding point to recognition and mobility. He would define it by Darwin’s theory survival of the fittest, that assumes only the strongest and smartest will shine from within a greater populous.

But what can be said on behalf of nurture? I think a lot. Like life in South America, most less-industrial Islamic countries live life by the concepts of Jihad. A heavily misquoted term in present-America, Jihad at a most basic level is defined by its pay it forward religiosity. Practicing peace-bearing Muslims believe that God looks more favorably upon an individual willing to give the shirt of his or her back for a struggling pedestrian, friend, or family member.

Remember that these are places where 99% of the populous averages seven to twenty five dollars a day in wages. So could it be that truly a village IS the entity that like a school bus picks up needy children and helps them build the tools to survive in a far too often cruel world? I think so.

Which brings me back to sports. Sport programs survive even in the poorest of areas. Why? Because poor people are the more industrious. They learn how to have fun with games like stick ball, kick the can, or soccer played in the middle of a dirt field.

 In America, till the age of twenty-five, kids still expect their parents to wipe their butt.

In South America, kids only expect their parents to love them. But whatever form that love takes on is mysterious and never the same. It varies, thus pushing the individual into a unified and heterogeneous village, where one for all, all for one is the expectation and the cultural commonality.

Soccer is the worlds sports because it is simple: a ball, a field, riled kids. Glory is the ultimate life flow of the sport. While the average recreational players are weeded from the sum total, the sprouts of dominant athletes are born. Each and everyone of these players represents an entire village.

If they fail, the village goes down with them.

If they succeed, the gods rain, and the lands are fatted and flourishing.

What is foreign to the American principle is the team orientation of South American slum people. By our standards, they are mad, backward, and hysterical. But is not madness a fruit of passion; passion a fruit of love? Where America has gotten it wrong is in our individualism and our need to be in the spotlight.

The spotlight is not meant for most. In South America its meant for the village in its entirety. Their humility is fostered from their inception in the womb, and on the day of their birth, a celebration happens in the name of the village as a whole.

A life equals community pride.

Not some self-capitalistic revelation.

Soccer is the worlds sport.

Socialism’s belief in sharing is most industrious.

It grandfathers an overarching power. A power that truly knows how to love thy neighbor as thyself.