78walk

Go Team!

Went to a University of Oklahoma football game yesterday. Unlike most of the folks there, I actually graduated from the school. These days, however, I only go to a game when a friend has a surplus ticket. There are a great many intelligent people who see football as a stupid, mindless, pointless endeavor (that's definitely true for many members of the school's faculty). Football is stupid, but I enjoy it nevertheless. To me, it represents a relatively benign, metaphorical form of tribalism. You don't have to look very hard to find far less benign forms of tribalism - people regularly and systematically kill each other over such differences in many parts of the world including (but certanly not limited to) the Middle East, the Balkans, Ireland, etc.

Football is essentially mindless entertainment, and the way some "fans" take it so seriously can be completely absurd, but many if not most of our other regular activities can be seen as falling in the same general category. Don't know about you, but I certainly see no shortage of brainlessness at my workplace. Many of those professors who see football as a horrific cancer on their University get very serious about equally idiotic political infighting within their academic circles.

I think it's just a fundamental characteristic of the human race that we are capable of taking almost anything far too seriously. I don't have an answer for that problem, but I know that the answer is not ridiculing someone else's dumb fun whilst regarding one's own with immense gravity.