About the author : paulwesslundwriter
Paul Wesslund spent a career writing and editing for newspapers and in the energy industry. When he retired in 2015 he went on to write two books on how kindness and integrity leads to success, wrote a monthly energy column, became an environmental organizer, and got involved in the leadership of his church.
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From sports to politics, we celebrate hate
I sat down to watch sports on the last day of November and came away thinking only about our national disease of hatred and hypocrisy.
It was of course the well-covered excellent college football game between Michigan and Ohio State, with a thrilling ending. But that morphed into an even better-covered post-game fight with stories that read more like a police report, with players and reporters getting by police pepper spray.
There’s no shortage of tsk-tsking over the fight, and yes, each school was fined $100,000 (which they will somehow have to come up with a way to pay from their $200 million budgets.)
What I saw on my TV was a celebration of selfishness and meanness I see daily from some motorists speeding past me at 80 mph and others ignoring stop signs, to state and national politics that insist on their side being completely right and those who disagree completely wrong.
As I watched players shoving at each other after the winning team tried to plant their flag on the home team’s field, announcers clucked at how sad the spectacle was.
Yet those same announcers just minutes earlier enthused over an Ohio State player’s fighting spirit, admiringly reading his quotation displayed on the screen: “They hate us, we hate them. That’s the way it’s got to be. That’s the way we want it to be.”
After the game a Michigan player critiqued Ohio State, saying “they got to learn how to lose.”
Umm, Saturday’s disgrace shows that teams also need to learn how to win.
Just when I was having some success chalking this all up to boys being boys, I read in Rolling Stone about a fan grabbing hold of Kacey Musgraves during a concert. (Some of her post-show comments about the incident weren’t what you’d want in a role model, however.) I saw a story in The New Yorker about Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, who once closed down a bar shouting “Kill all Muslims” while on a tour with the Concerned Veterans of America.
Shadowbahn, a 2017 novel, describes a dystopian future, of an America split into regions based on culture and politics.
It’s tempting to think that for every such outrage there’s a story of kindness. But we’re not leading with those kinds of examples. A majority of our voters just elected as president a man who incited a mob to violently overthrow the government.
A phrase from a favorite movie of mine fits here. In Remember the Titans, a high school football player tells his team captain, “attitude reflects leadership.”
I’ve been haunted these past few years by two observations on my America. One was a 2017 study that found that 1 in five of us thinks the country would be better off if people in the opposing party “just died.” Another is Shadowbahn, a disturbing 2017 novel by Steve Erickson about a future United States where people have all moved to regions that reflect their culture and biases, making an outsider’s drive through one of those territories a perilous one.
The electoral college map from November’s presidential election shows a depressingly divided country.
The electoral college map from November’s presidential election makes it look like a Shadowbahn future has arrived. Stark swaths of red and blue divide us. Remembering the venomous rhetoric that led to those results only makes the picture scarier.
From national politics to college football, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future, or even the present, of civility. Instead I find myself thinking of the past, coaching YMCA T-ball, when games would end with the teams lining up to shake hands.