Soca Warriors

Watching the FIFA World Cup is hard, three games a day starting at 5:30am. It is a full day’s work. Despite the exhausting time requirement, it is a unique and wonderful spectacle. Many of the players are millionaires, but as many from poorer countries do not earn much. They are all there, on the same pitch playing an even game. It is great fun to watch the Brazilians play, an aesthetic pleasure appears only once every four years. But it is equally exciting to see who is going to be the surprise and the spirited team. In the past it was the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, the Sea of Red of Korea and this year, it appears to be the Soca Warriors of Trinidad and Tobago. They played Sweden in their first ever Finals game. Nobody gave them a chance; their starting goalie injured in warm-up; and in the beginning of the second half their main defender was red-carded. As the minutes pass, as the Swedes kept attacking, you can see the Warriors take on a special aura, as if they were processed by the spirits of great sportsmen of the past. There are no panic and no desperation, just determination and purity of mind. It is a unique experience and you can see it in their eyes. At that decisive moment when odds are stacked so high against them, they collectively made up their minds to stand tall and give no grounds. It is not easy for one person to make that decision, but for all eleven to do so at the same time, it is truly sublime. And in the end they fought off the Swedes and made themselves proudly known to the world. The score was 0-0 but it is the most exhilarating game so far. Dozens of games will be played in these games but few will be universally remembered. People will remember this game decades later and remember the Soca Warriors with respect. This is the wonder of the World Cup—when the world comes together we learn that we respect not the powerful but the ones who stands up against them with pride.

The Remote Controlled Act of Jumping

In the isn’t-that-convenient column of things, the legalization of gay marriage is now officially a member. Both in Canada and the U.S., where the governments want to do whatever they want and the population to be quiet about it, the issue of gay marriage is brought to legislation forefront. In the U.S., an impassable constitutional amendment is tabled; and in Canada, the Harper government wants a vote to make gay marriage illegal. In both cases, the targets are not about gay marriage but to turn the legislative agenda away from the wars. I would call this a slight-of-hand if it were not so very obvious. These days when politicians want to misdirect our attentions, they do not even try magic tricks; they simply say look and expect us to follow their fingers. Have we gotten so stupid that we follow them like a dog? I certainly hope that is not the case. The problem is though is not with the people who are against gay marriage but those who support it. Apparently these people also have questions with which the governments are uncomfortable. The governments are expecting that these people will drop everything and put all their efforts on this single issue. Legalization of gay marriage is certain worth defending, but people should not jump every time the governments say so. Whoever set the agenda wins; it is the oppositions’ job to take it away from the governments. Unfortunately, that is very unlikely. Maybe we are that dumb after all.

Wrong Question

Richard Roeper complains in his TV show that the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” does not tell both side of the argument. That is certainly a valid criticism. He uses “whether human beings are responsible for global warming” as an example for the questions only one side of which is argued in the film. I have not seen the film but I do not doubt Roeper on this point. This human-responsibility question is a faulted question, however. The people who want nothing done about global warming use it as an excuse and a delay tactic. The question sounds important but has no real meaning to it. So people believe that global warming is a cyclical thing with nothing to do with CO2 we created. This may be the case, but we know that we do make a ridiculous amount of CO2 and that does have an effect on the temperature of this planet. Even if we take the position that our CO2 production is not the main cause of global warming, reducing it would more than likely slow down the temperature increase. No matter what the answer to the question is, CO2 reduction is probably going to be helpful. To say because it is not the main cause, we should not do anything about it is simply stupid. Being cold may not be the main cause of getting flu, virus is, but that does not mean that we should walk around naked in the cold during the flu season. If the world is going to end and cutting down CO2 will give the world a couple of decades more, why not? After all, we are a culture that would spend hundred of thousands of dollars to extend the life of one person for a day. What is a few billions for every human beings on the planet?

Overcompensation

As the FIFA World Cup is scheduled to begin this week, the strange North American inferiority complex with football comes to the forth again. It is perhaps telling that people in the rest of the world does not care about what sports we play over here. Some play basketball, some baseball, some ice hockey, and even some American football, but no one is concerned, much less laugh uneasily about any of them. Somehow, in North America, mostly the States but some Canadians too, most people acts towards soccer like a little boy leaning on the fence murmuring about the big boys on the field playing without him. It is rather pathetic really. So, I am not going to call it the soccer world cup but the football world cup. This is not because I have anything against North American football, American or Canadian. After all, I am a fan of the Detroit and the B.C. Lions. The problem is, and it is well documented, that North American Football is a misnomer. You cannot call a game football when 99% of the time kicking the ball is prohibited. When it comes to other major sports around here, the names tends to be very logical, basketball and baseball are named after the objectives of the game, and hockey the tool of the game. If North American football is to be renamed to be more logical, it may be called lineball. It is, after all, a game that moves from line to line until the goal line is achieved. The Lineball Lions may not sound very macho but come to think of it, neither is football. Oh, well, if kicking a ball is sissy, then calling a game football is hypocritically sissy. No wonder it is such a violent game.