Politics Is My Sports
I don’t care about sports. I really don’t. I can listen to someone I respect speak very compellingly about how important sports is to them, nod along with them and smile with sincere appreciation for their insight, and then go right back to not caring about sports at all. Even when exercise and fitness became a pillar of my personal lifestyle and I began participating in races, e.i. actual competitive sports events, I still did not care about sports. Not caring about sports is a fairly stable aspect of my personality.
Yet to some extent, I must care about sports. It’s practically the unwritten law of my community. Because regardless of whether I or anyone else cares about a thing, if their community in general cares enough about it, they must care at least about the fact that the community cares about it.
And so, even if I would have preferred to sleep through the night the Cavaliers won the 2016 Championship as if nothing important was expected to happen, I couldn’t have, because my neighbors on every side of my apartment woke me up anyway, their cheers and celebratory explosions coming in through the windows opened wide to the summer night air. I don’t care about sports. But I do care about how much sleep I get on a weeknight, so in this instance, I had no choice but to care, just a little bit, about sports. And I didn’t like it.
Sports is one of the more benign of those things that we must care about at least a little bit, at least enough to react when it ripples so insistently through the crowd around us. Religion is another, more tumultuous one. Atheists sometimes have no choice but to be seen as anti-theists, haters of God and His Followers, in the same way that people like me are perceived as killjoys by the hardcore Cavaliers fans next door. Politics is another one, and it’s a real doozy. There is no possible neutral position; “you’re either with us or against us, and I sure don’t see you with us.”
One election year in my early twenties, I said to a friend of mine, “I think that politics is my sports,” thinking of myself as a spectator waiting anxiously to see if my candidate! was coming in ahead in the polls, and what the opponents’ weaknesses might be. My friend was skeptical of the analogy, since sports “doesn’t affect anything important,” and that unlike sports, politics actually matters.
But… sports does matter to a lot of people who matter to me. It matters to people I call my family, my neighbors, even my community leaders and trusted civil servants. People I’ve never seen to be interested in sports before nevertheless followed the Cavaliers in the months leading up to that championship win; suddenly it was interesting, because everyone around us was interested. Sports matters enough to my community that our stadiums are municipally subsidized, and those who object to that are likely to be dismissed as anti-community, at least in public opinion.
And politics doesn’t seem to matter enough to keep whole sections of the population from saying things like “I’m not into politics” and “Let’s keep politics out of this”. Politics doesn’t matter enough to me that I didn’t at one point date a person who believed that our then-president was born in Kenya. Political disagreement has never been a dealbreaker for me, even though I care very deeply about it. In the same way, I don’t think even the most hardcore sports fan would allow their loyalty to team to disrupt their love for their family and friends.
Politics is my sports because, as far as I can tell, my interest in sports is as reluctant and as coincidental as many people’s interest in politics. I respect that not everyone cares about my political ideas or wants to listen to me talk about them, but that doesn’t keep me from doing it anyway, like a gadfly in the ears of the complacent. In the same way, I’m going to grudgingly put up with the sports-talk that flares up around me whenever Lebron does something or other, and I care enough about honesty to admit that I’m not especially thrilled that I have to hear about it.
American society is ostensibly very individualistic. Our culture emphasizes and praises individual choices, opinions, styles, perspectives, and principles. Yet there are certain topics we all have to care about, because even the decision not to care is itself going to carry a lot of cultural weight and isn’t to be taken lightly. A loud and public statement to the effect of “I don’t care” is sure to communicate a lot more than apathy; it is also a vehement social rejection. We all have to care about politics, we all have to care about religion, we all have to care about economic inequality, and we even have to care about sports and television and music as long as they hold sway in our communities.
What would it look like, if your family’s holiday dinner was made suddenly, sickeningly awkward because your cousin showed up in a [Sports Team] cap and your aunt scolded him for “trying to start arguments” with the rest of the family, a family of proud [Rival Team] fans. I can’t even tell if that’s something that happens in families that care about sports, or if it’s just something people joke about. But either way, it’s how politics really is. I come from a family of passionate, stubborn, and extremely intellectual people, and our political opinions are as diverse as our personalities are insufferably similar. When a political discussion breaks out at one of our family gatherings, I’m generally torn between a need to EXPLAIN! DEFEND! PONTIFICATE! and an equally strong desire to simply be happy with the people I love. I don’t enjoy having that happiness challenged by the disturbing knowledge that they voted for that guy. But if politics matter to both of us, then we owe it to each other to acknowledge our political disagreements openly.
I think of politics as my sports, and suddenly the stakes of that family debate are thrown into a less threatening light. If the family really love each other, then they’ll either resolve it (because it matters) or they’ll look past it (if it doesn’t). So why not talk politics with family? Why not talk religion with family? Why not even sex, or mental health, or gender? If I can enjoy my family without talking about what matters to me, then I can equally enjoy my family if we disagree about the things that matter to me. Because our family matters to all of us, and that isn’t up for debate.
The same is true for the opinions and perspectives and values of my neighbors, friends, and coworkers. I may not agree with them on things that we find vitally important, but if we’re going to be working together in this hodgepodge of personalities we call society, we’re going to have to face those disagreements head-on. That means sometimes we’re going to have to argue with each other, and that’s fine. I felt a special kind of terror the day we were in the grocery store and my girlfriend decided to talk to a fellow shopper about his tee-shirt, which promoted a politician who was outspokenly against the rights of people like my girlfriend and me. I might have been right to be afraid. But in a way, my girlfriend was also right to start that conversation. We share a neighborhood grocery store with that man; he is part of our community, and the politics we disagree on matter to both of us. It’s good to talk about that, even if it isn’t easy or immediately helpful.
I don’t believe that any of us should hide our deeply personal thoughts and experiences from the people who mean a lot to us. The more we care about each other, the more we should argue with each other about important things. Whether you like it or not, difficult and awkward conversations about divisive and controversial topics are going to happen wherever people congregate. That means at the holiday dinner table, on social media, in the grocery checkout line, and on the streets of your neighborhood. For you, it may be Lebron’s duplicitous career choices. To me, it’s the patriarchy or capitalism or cisheteronormativity or ethnocentric media representation. Either way, it matters to enough of us that it has to matter to all of us.
