"Courage, sacrifice, determination, commitment, toughness, heart, talent, guts. That's what little girls are made of; the heck with sugar and spice."
-- Bethany Hamilton, the greatest female surfer
In the three months of my life I've spent here, I have played countless games. I have hit countless kids and RAs with dodgeballs. Sometimes in the face. I have been hit countless times. Sometimes in the face. Once or twice in another tender spot.
In all these games, in all the thousands of thrown balls, I have not witnessed a single injury. I have never had to cart a single kid to the nurse. I have never had to get toilet paper for a bloody nose. I have never had to band-aid a boo-boo. Not even after a ball smashes someone's face.
Recently, our CTY site found out that we will no longer be allowed to play Trench. The black-letter email came from the bigshots at Baltimore. It put an end to any game that involves throwing something at someone. This includes Spongeball (dodgeball played with wet sponges), Extreme Cubing (doing a rubiks cube while people throw dodgeballs), Battle Chess (life-size chess with dodgeballs) and my personal favorite, D-Day (RAs bunker down while the kids storm them). Luckily we can still play kickball. Even though it involves a fast-moving ball, there is sufficient "gray area" in the directive to keep that game alive. Oh joy.
The administration wasted no time. Usually we sign up for activities for the rest of the week on Monday. This week, we had a good chunk of the camp choosing Trench as their weekly -- meaning an activity they play every day. As soon as the email landed, we pulled a massive mid-week activity swap. We switched all the kids signed up for Trench -- every one of them healthy -- to Capture the Flag. On the first day of Capture the Flag, two kids got injured.
Upon hearing the news of the cancellation, I was angry, then I was angry and baffled, then I was angry but unsurprised.
I don't know what the impetus was. The Los Angeles administration either doesn't know or isn't telling us. I wish I could rationalize that since Trench has been a CTY staple for decades, then clearly something really egregiously horrific must have happened to force the hand of the big Baltimore bosses. Maybe kids these days are stronger: lots of steroids going around. Maybe kids these days are more vicious: those darn violent videogames encouraging headshots.
But we all know it's not the changing nature of kids that led to Trench's outlawry. Of course kids are changing. They're texting and facebooking. But changing in ways that matter for dodgeball? Please.
I'd like to blame it on protective parents. Or on big bosses who need to feel important to prove some frivolous point. In my bitterest fantasies, I see a conference room with big black leather chairs, bottled water, and vegetable platters with Lo-Fat Ranch dressing. A Power Point presentation flips through slides of kids having fun on a dodgeball field. The same words and phrases fill the air: "lawsuit," "injury," "could," "possibly in our best interests," "risky," "danger," "violent." Words and phrases such as "fun," "competition," "injury statistic report," and "have any of us ever even played this game?" are absent.
But blaming the parents and admin is a surface skirmish of a much deeper way of thinking pervading 21st century thought: catastrophism.
That's the true culprit. We live in a catastrophist society. Like every generation before us, we believe we are living at the edge of the end of the world. If it bleeds it leads. Never mind that the MIT psychologist Steven Pinker has noted that we are living in an era of unprecedented peace. No one wants to hear about peace. Not really. We're not trained to. Tragedy and problems are what catch our attention. They give us purpose. And when there's not enough bad stuff to go around, well, we invent our own. And then Chief Illiniwek is outlawed. And then Trench dodgeball is outlawed.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. One person ruins it for everyone. Appeasing the minority at the expense of the majority in the name of fictitious and sensationalized fears. At first I was shocked that RAs and returning CTY students weren't more outraged. There's plenty to be mad about. Who are a bunch of faceless myths in Baltimore to tell us what to do at our site? Don't they know that dodgeballs don't hurt us, but help us be children? Don't they realize that there's a sort of magic to Trench -- maybe not a major kind, but something that is at least our own? Don't they know that the best way to get jet-lagged newly arrived students in a community is with the competitive camraderie of Trench? Have they forgotten their own childhoods -- childhoods of scraped knees and ding-dong ditching, pick-up games and padless tackle football, bleeding and crying and playing so hard and so often that you're exhausted and dirty and blissful?
But then I realized that outlawing Trench was no surprise. CTY did the easy thing here. They did what, on paper and in the comfort of a chair in Baltimore, seems to be the right thing. There is nothing exceptional, nothing suprising about their decision. People and organizations across the world make the very same decision every day: the one that demands no courage. The one that allows us to nod soberly as we spin worst-case scenario fictions until they seem imminent and so we must act against them. Who cares that suddenly, we're not acting in anyone's best interest -- although we believe we are. Who cares that we're acting only to assuage our own largely unfounded inquities.
The result of that decision is why so many adults are unhappy, why so many adults have lost any semblance of an inner child.
We have smart kids here, and they proved their intelligence in their lack of outrage. They know the game Baltimore played. When I asked one student about how he felt about Trench being outlawed, he said, "I'm angry. But it's more stupid than anything else." The kids get it. Even if they don't yet possess the vocabulary, they get it. For how much longer until the catastrophic world makes them see the end of the world, too, I'm not sure.
The bottom line is this: anyone who has played Trench knows that dodgeballs don't hurt people. Not with any permanence. Not even if Baltimore's worst-case scenario fears are realized -- I'm sure they have been somewhere -- and a dodgeball sends a kid to the hospital. Or a dodgeball leaves a scar. Kids are resilient. I've bled, had the wind knocked out of me, collided, gotten smashed. All those cuts and bruises heal. Even if they scar. This decision left a deeper wound, one that we might forget but one that will not heal. Outlawing Trench killed more than tradition. It killed pieces of childhood. And for anyone who says "Who Cares?" to that, then it's already too late for you.
I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything. I doubt neither would these kids. Unfortunately, they no longer have a choice. They've been nailed by a dodgeball from the grown-up world. And when you're hit by that one, you're out forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment