World Cup starts soon. Can't we just have fun anymore?
I love giant sporting events - the Tour de France, the Olympics - and soccer’s quadrennial tournament rates among my favorites. This year’s FIFA World Cup is being hosted by Qatar and I’m excited enough to consider upgrading my TV.
From a protest standpoint these big events are like the yearly IMF meetings in Davos: they present an opportunity to have a voice on a world stage.
There are always more voices clamoring to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do, buy, or consume. Can’t have a Butterfinger, that’s made by Nestlé and that company is god awful (it’s true, they really are). Burn your Harry Potter books because J.K. Rowling’s views on laws surrounding transgender folk aren’t the most progressive (I’ve read a bit on both sides of this and frankly I need some to explain it to me). That iPhone is built by children. Boycott the Beijing Olympics because China’s doing X, Y, and Z. The Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has a well-documented history of corruption so nothing they do is OK.
The Qataris and this World Cup. There have been accusations of bribes and corruption just to get the World Cup awarded (although that seems de rigeur). From a weather standpoint Qatar is a difficult place to hold the World Cup. They’ve already had to push the schedule back to November to avoid the worst of the heat - Doha’s average daytime temperature in August is 100DegF. Qatar’s laws are closer to Sharia than to anything we’re used to in the West with things like homosexuality, alcohol, swearing, and revealing clothing all banned. There have been continuing allegations of slave labor conditions and inhumane treatment of the foreign workers brought in to construct the World Cup venues.
All the shouting. Predictably, my Twitter and Reddit feeds include lots of posts and discussions clamoring for me to boycott the World Cup. The Qataris are the worst. FIFA is terrible.
They’re not wrong, but like a lot of discussions these days there’s a whiff of just wanting to see it all burn. “It’s not perfect, someone was treated wrong, let’s make it fail.” I’ve come to see this mob mentality as the dark side of today’s movement towards equality and justice. In the internet’s great democratization there are so many people working tirelessly to lift up others and to gain equality for the underprivileged and those that society casts out, yet this “bad thing hurt someone, cancel bad thing altogether” voice undermines that.
This mentality is amplified and encouraged by social media. The most polarized conversations are the ones the algorithms are most likely to push into our feeds. In the past it might have made it as far as a newspaper article or even the national news and then faded out of the news cycle: today that’s no longer the case.
So where’s the fun when every single thing is problematic to someone? How do we navigate through that, giving some thought to the issues being brought up but also continuing to enjoy the odd Butterfinger?
Nuance, laziness, or flexible moral code? I eat meat even though the animals I eat are considered sentient. I watched the Olympics in Beijing knowing full well that the Chinese government was putting ethnic Uighurs in internment camps. I won’t shop at Hobby Lobby because of their religious positions (which look positively enlightened in comparison to the Qataris). I can’t get on a treadmill at the gym where I can see Fox News on the TV (don’t get me started on how deeply harmful that propaganda is) but I’ll happily watch other Fox products. The 2022 World Cup is carried by Fox in this part of the world.
I’m not without a strong moral compass but clearly there is some magic here about what qualifies as the difference between boycott, begrudging acceptance, and indifference. Maybe I’m subconsciously taking the Middle Path, maybe I just can’t be bothered to protest every single thing, maybe I want to enjoy something without having to run it through a moral filter first. There is a mental calculus that goes on here, pitting how offensive I find something against how much personal discomfort I’m willing to incur by boycotting it.
Strong99 is a movement towards how we can be strong, adaptable, and thrive when we are older: in short, we want to enjoy a longer, purposeful life.
We must maintain our own agency in the face of all the voices. It’s not rational or sustainable or even healthy to listen to all of the voices. We will only be exposed to more and more social media in the future.
We must be able to listen and accept social change, understand the causes of inequality and war, but also accept that we live in a global society with everyone else, many of whom espouse different views.
We have to do our best, enjoying life while being mindful of the plight of others. We can’t take the weight of the world on our shoulders.
So, I’m going to enjoy the World Cup and the occasional Butterfinger, keep educating myself and use my writing to help make the world just a little bit better.