Politics & Sports

The arena is packed to the brim with rabid fans. They strain and shuffle to see the tiny figures down below and they erupt in cheers and whistles as flashbulbs blink from all over the building. Some are even tearing up it would seem. This isn’t a sporting even though; it’s Barack Obama accepting the nomination for president at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.  It could also describe quite a few political rallies and celebrations that took place for either side these last few months leading up to the election.

The video yesterday showed that politics is woven into sports, but from the other angle, politics almost is a sport. Both politics and sports offer money, power, and prestige to participants; both involve massively divided fan (or supporter) bases, and both are talked about—a lot.

My thinking is that this is in no way a good thing for us in this country. For sports, for good or ill, they don’t work without division and competition. Alternately, nations need the competition to end at some point if any work is expected to get done. Arik Parnass pointed something out in an article for his university newspaper: “You might cheer loudly for a monster dunk at the Verizon Center, but would you scream about a well-delivered presentation at work? You might clap or pat your coworker on the back, but anything else would be considered taboo. You would be forgiven for honking your horn at three in the morning after a playoff win, but would locals trying to sleep be so forgiving if it was due to the stock market reaching a monthly high?” I don’t mean to say that sports should illicit reactions and politics shouldn’t, just that the reactions shouldn’t be so focused on the division between competitors. This sounds like a naïve “why can’t we all just get along” story and I guess it is, but wouldn’t it be productive to stop pretending politics is just a game to be sensationalized on cable news?

 

Edit: The article I quoted: http://www.thehoya.com/sports/politics-sadly-viewed-as-a-sport-1.2951647