Sport heals war

War is only acceptable because it is anonymous and invisible to all but a few people: those who are mad enough to think it is acceptable, those who are cruel enough to see a solution in its midst, and those who are trapped in it, and have no choice.  War’s victims spread beyond destruction, the dead, the injured.  Its symptoms are emotional, economic, social and physical.  The invisible, and the visible.  Those who help the victims can be as damaged as the victims themselves.  Reading of a battle can change your view on life.  Remembrance attempts to give us order out of the chaos of war and loss.  We try to heal the bereaved.  Remembrance attempts to show brutality as heroism because heroism is the only thing left. 

War is dirty.  War is loss.  War is imposed on innocent populations by the bullies who run our countries.  War is wrong.

War is only acceptable because it is anonymous and invisible.  States go to war.  Individuals engage in unspeakable violence.  Individuals go to jail for life for a mere microbe on a spot on the face of war and state.  States change the rules when they go to war.  It’s OK to blast cities to smithereens, but it’s not OK to drive away when you scrape someone’s car.  War turns everything upside down.  Everything becomes confused.

When you remove the anonymity, tell stories of individuals, that’s when war becomes unacceptable; and that’s the only way of defeating war in the long run.  Just think.  Removing anonymity from war should be the first priority of those of us who write.   

Sport and culture and heritage make it possible to remove the anonymity from war.  Sport in particular.  Sport is universal.  Sport gives us individuals to know in countries we may never even have visited, and whose languages we don’t speak.  Sport has the potential to alleviate chaos.  To uncover the lies that war tells.  Sport shows us people drifting powerlessly in the mess of war their states chose for them, but still being themselves. Sport shows us people overcoming unbelievable odds.  Sport shows us bravery, and friendship, and cheating and goodness and evil and all the various things to which humans are prone.  It gives us the opportunity to forgive, to see the good behind the bad, to see the shy, near naked individual behind the narcissus state.

Names and faces, and lives all come alive through the stories of sport.  Sport beats war hands down, because sport tells us it’s impossible not to feel empathy, admiration, respect and joy for someone from another country, even if you are at war with them.  Sport has rules, and if people disagree they talk about it, they don’t beat each other up.  Sport beats war hands down.  Sport heals war.