Through the semester we have seen a great deal of trouble following competitive sports in all forms and arenas. Any rational human being would therefore conclude that competitive sports in our society perhaps diminishes our goal as a species to unite and intellectually grow. Now some would certainly argue that sports benefit and foster skills in our younger generations that will benefit them in the future, but at what cost? Now recognize, sports and competitive sports are not one in the same. Sports benefit the individual physically which in turn strengthens cognitive skills. Naturally we can spend hours listing the benefits, which i would not disagree with. Now competitive sports on the other hand encourage winning at all costs which prompts emphasis on physical domination rather than by skill. The competitive aspect encourages egos to inflate while discriminating against others who can not perform at the same level. How can our society honestly expect to grow and unify if we encourage and expect our younger generations to follow in our foot steps? What does competitive sports teach our youth if their parents are screaming at the point of explosion on the sidelines? What values will our youth be taught if coaches yell in a non-constructive manner at athletes when they make a mistake, as if they already do not feel bad enough? I also happen to be the most competitive individual you would ever meet.
D. Albus KIN 332I S 3017
3 comments:
WTF
:/ WTF = Wow That's Fascinating!
i hope...
I won't sit here and list the benefits of competition out for you because you seam to have a grasp of why our society eats them up so much but I will point out to you the major force that continually causes sports to be perpetually more fueled to the cause you so direly want to rid us of; change. Sport is a social construct remember and as such reflects our society. In society we face pressure and competition and just about every characteristic you listed above but in sports it's a much more amplified form of them. Instead of a boss hastling and employee for five minutes about a typo on a report or a parent yelling at their child for forgetting to take out the trash, sport provides a coach, a team, and a fan base that constantly provides criticism and the need for improvement of our athletes. I've been assistant manager of an establishment and trained multiple employees in the process; the ones that made it were the ones we threw out on the sales floor during our busiest seasons. The ones that want a spoon to feed them and a hand to hold take much longer to improve because they aren't forced to learn. In sports athletes are given a hostile environment to learn their trade and if they don't make it: tough, they're cut or they don't play. Society has many of the same rigors in different forms. I'm not saying that the only way to succeed is to go play sports so you can get stressed into being a good person; simply put, sports are a catalyst for forced learning as much as competition. Putting the two together and paying the most elite athletes in the world to deal with the chaos simply provides an extreme model of what our capitalist society already perpetuates in the workplace.
-Chase Owens
Kin 332I Tues/Thurs
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