A Column of Enchantment: Not Even Barely About Basketball
Posted by Joseph Nardone on November 17th, 2015I’ve mentioned this many times before to the point of nausea, but I am about to do so again. The St. John’s Red Storm are my favorite team. Not only in college basketball. In all of sports. There’s a few reasons why — mostly Bootsy to blame — yet it is the reality of my life. So few people roaming this planet were as excited as I was when their season was about to open on Friday night against Wagner.
Sometimes sports just takes a backseat to news around the world. Friday was one of those instances. (AP)
Before the game, however, some really horrific news broke. Everyone knows the story by now. At the time, though, the events unfolding in France were simply mind-boggling. Like many other people, I struggled with trying to separate my emotions from attempting to enjoy the basketball games. Some people, ones smarter than I at least, decided to not venture on Twitter or discuss the matter at all. It was their right. So, too, were those who tried to find comfort in the sports being played. To each their own, really. There’s definitely no right or wrong way to handle tragedy.
Judging others who decided to continue to watch basketball and — how dare they — comment on it, are infuriating. Parts of me get it. We’re all a little bit selfish. We need to make things about us. When something as tragic as the terror that was taking place in France is happening far from home, people have to localize their outrage. Still, the anger was misplaced, misguided and mostly founded out of ignorance. Some people HAD to tweet about the basketball games because it was their jobs.
Others, not simply the ones who found an escape via sports, simply didn’t feel the need to comment on something they had yet to understand. Events weren’t over. Facts were not readily available. Thing is, it is okay to not comment on every single thing that happens during a given day. Even when tragedy strikes. No singular person should be upheld to some standard that requires to share every thought, opinion, or insight on whatever event is taking place. Again, everyone is different. One person’s values of sharing their thoughts or wanting more information is not others. Some cling to their privacy, want to grieve alone, or a plethora of other reasons THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU.
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Now, let me get real selfish here. In doing so, I am going to admit some things I probably shouldn’t, but in the interest of not simply coming here and bashing those with opinions different than mine, it is wiser to paint the picture than it is to judge others from afar.
The person I am today isn’t the same as the one yesterday. Not by much, but to some degree. However, the person I am today is leaps and bounds a different person than I was a year ago, two years before that, a decade earlier, etc. It makes sense, as everyone evolves from certain mindsets and perspectives and values. Keeping that in mind (oh my goodness, please keep that in mind), I’ve spent more of my life being an awful person than a thoughtful one. I can’t pinpoint exactly when the dynamics shifted for me, but for the better part of my 32 years on this planet it would have been fair to call me ignorant, truly selfish, and a slew of other negative adjectives could have been connected to my characteristics.
Cities all around the world showed their support for Paris and France in varying ways since Friday – including New York City. (AP)
I would like to think the person I am now is better, although even that can be debated. Like everyone, my flaws run deep, are hard to change, and many of them are things I am willingly neglecting. So is the story of many of our lives. Sans a few extraordinary people, and those who lie to themselves well enough, it is the personal demons I carry that drive me. Sometimes towards them. Sometimes to my goals. Often, in attempts to get away from them. My demons, probably like yours, are the primary motivators for my life.
The cliched thing would have been to say my daughters are responsible for my change. Now, of course I do whatever I can for them. Still, truth be told, everything I do for them is based off my own fears of my own flaws. The time I spend with them in general — to helping them with their homework; to my being employed so that they have a roof over their head and warm food on the table — are done because I am fearful that my demons may one day become theirs. All of that is probably poorly explained, yet there’s decent reason to think you will understand where I’m coming from — because everything in our life, from values to ideologies to discipline tactics, are formed for us initially by others, then by us again at an early age, never truly culminating until death. Since I admitted that I’ve spent a vast portion of my life being a horrible member of our society, it is my self-awareness of that fact which drives me to prevent my children from having a similar fate.
More simply put: I do not want them to grow up uneducated, ignorant, hateful, bitter, angry, jaded, scared, or any of the other things that have haunted me (my own fault, by the way, not anyone else’s) nearly every waking moment of my life.
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Now that all of that sh– is out of the way; time to get on my soapbox. I’m going to start by stealing a line from the character Morgan, who is the current human compass on the show The Walking Dead. “All life is precious.” Seems simple enough, right? Except it also seems really hard to grasp this concept.
Simply roam around your Facebook to see the hate on any given day. You don’t need a tragic event to unfold to see racism hurled on your timeline, or uneducated opinions being written down as fact, or people getting into heated arguments over certain belief systems. It is truly a wasteland for the worst types of mindsets by people, as few of them would ever spew that sort of rhetoric in public. However, if they are saying so to their “friends” or “followers,” then they must believe what they say — at least to some degree. Why else say it?
In my youth it could be said I didn’t give a single sh– about anything outside my bubble. Makes sense for a lot of younger people. Especially ones as selfish as I was. All the horrors going on in the world, all of them, didn’t bother me. Not because I had a fully formed opinion on the matter, but because it didn’t directly alter my life. Would Lucy go to the prom with me? Unless racism would make her answer yes or no, it didn’t matter.
Then I began to use the word “tolerate” a lot as I got older. Looking back at it now, ugh, I hate it so much. For a decent stretch of my life I thought we should tolerate people with other viewpoints. No matter the reason. No need to do anything, though. Simply tolerate it. Toleration, to many, is the polite way of saying you plan to ignore issues or not treat them in a just way. It didn’t matter the cause, because as long as I was tolerant of the issue I couldn’t be labeled negatively…
Tolerance is dumb. We should RESPECT each other. One doesn’t have to agree with same-sex marriage, or what levels racism is at in our country, or religion, to respect another’s beliefs on the topic. Now, and I admit this fully, here is where the idea of respect truly gets tricky for me. It is truly easy for me to respect those people who fight against bigotry, and as far as I am concerned a person’s religious structure is something I can appreciate, if not feel somewhat jealous of as I yearn to have the same feeling as those who have blind faith in a better world. The issue is how am I to respect those who give no hecks about topics such as racism; or how am I supposed to respect the opinions of those who lump all Muslims into one group and want our borders walled off because of that?
Kinda tricky if I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Then again, in matters like these, nuance is key. Respect doesn’t necessarily have to be earned, as rewarding it for the sake of saying you respect all seems silly. The least — THE VERY LEAST — a person can do before making wide, arching, all-encompassing opinions on topics, is read. Instead, a large portion of people have used the tragedy in France to push some idea that our nation’s borders need to be closed, which would make sense if all people from all other countries were evil and we weren’t already killing each other domestically as is while ignoring that many of the heroes that day were Muslims. It is with that narrow scope, with a scarily narrower mind, people view the world — and I must admit I no longer understand why that is the case.
We are all people. No matter the color. No matter the race. It doesn’t matter if you like boys, girls, think Jesus was the son of god or a bad carpenter… we are all people. How we got here is up for debate, and (your) god knows enough wars have been fought over religious beliefs, but we are all here now. All of us. Relatively speaking, on this small planet. Billions of us, all if us looking and thinking different, right f—ing here. We should have ONE goal above all others. ONE. We should be here for each other. I mean, there isn’t really any other sane choice. If you won’t do so out of love for other members of our species, do so for selfish reasons — as we’re literally killing each other otherwise.
No value can be placed on any one person’s life. Yet we treat life with such a carefree attitude that it is scary. Like myself for most of my life, many people do not see pass their individual every day. It is much easier to explain away the evils of the world by way of ignorance and stereotyping or being so beholden to a belief system that all people who are not with you are against you. It is all ludicrous. Honestly.
We are all willing to fight for the things we believe in. I can respect that. It is something that needs to be done to help better our futures anyway. What we need to begin to realize, though, is that it is the fights we don’t believe in that are also worth fighting for. It is to stop pretending hatred, evil, and horror do not exist because of whatever justification we came up with that helps us sleep better at night. We need to do this, mind you, until there’s no reason to fight anymore.
What we should no longer tolerate, however, is fighting with each other… it is something no one should respect, can’t be tolerated, and even the ignorant would acknowledge is counterproductive.
Now cue the music. I’ve got some hot takes I want to get off my chest…
Joseph has covered college basketball both (barely) professionally and otherwise for over five years. A Column of Enchantment for Rush The Court on Thursdays and other basketball stuff for The Student Section on other days.
