From my experience playing soccer, sportsmanship has always been displayed on the field. If team A has the ball and someone from team B gets injured, team A will kick the ball out of bounds to the the injured player get off the field to receive treatment. When play resumes, team B will give the ball back to team A. This is not a written rule but one that is universally practiced because even though the teams are trying to beat each other, they want to do it in a fair way.
This idea has been present all throughout humanity. During World War I on Christmas day, German soldiers, who were fighting the British and French, put decorated Christmas Trees in front of their trenches. This led to a truce for the night. German, British, and French soldiers started singing carols together, exchanged gifts, and even started playing a game of soccer. This shows us that even in the trenches, one of the most inhumane environments, the soldiers still possessed the will to hang on the a little bit of humanity.
More evidence of this is found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch." In this book, Solzhenitsyn writes about the terrible conditions in the Russian Gulag. The prisoners are in a constant battle with one another for survival. This survival of the fittest mentality would lead one to think that the prisoners would be turned into animals with no regards for human decencies, the opposite is true however. Solzhenitsyn writes that the only way for the prisoners to survive is to work together to maintain a degree of humanness. It is the ones that lose this degree of humanness that are the ones to die first. When eating dinner, the prisoners to not immediately devour their food and pick scraps off the ground, but instead take their time. This display of human behavior is what allows the prisoners to survive the Gulag.
We as people need a certain amount of discipline and order to maintain what makes us human. You see examples of this all around our communities and it is what makes us humans. It separates us from "animals" and it is what has allowed our species to thrive and grow.
I find this to be a very interesting idea (the idea of societal unity and how human that is.) People have naturally been drawn to spending time with each other and growing as a society. Although some view their lives as a competition to simply beat the other guy, people still keep the mindset that, "We're all in this together so we might as well be fair and enjoy it."
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, if people took this though process to the next level and toned down their hatred and greed, the world would be such a better place. Why is it that WWI soldiers saw the beauty in peace for a split second only to then resume shooting at each other the next day? It is hard to say, but nevertheless, this dichotomy is something people need to look at and then realize that their true feelings don't really reside in evil, but in the joy of humanity.
David, This is a thoughtful post, and you consider the idea of collaboration from a few angles here. It'd be even better to ground your observations in a text (soccer rules, an article about a sportmanship award?). The historical example and the Alexander S. book are apt but are also paraphrase. Help your readers work with you by supplying them with a common text on which they might also expostulate or expand upon.
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