“World Peace” at a football game. Did you find that ironic? I mean, we just watched 30 minutes of hard hitting Super Bowl action. It’s not peaceful. It’s violent. And we loved it! Seriously. Why did Madonna (or whomever it was) have to go and spoil my football fun by making me think about world peace.
It’s pretty easy to argue that football is not a peaceful sport. Of course, few sports can be deemed “peaceful.” If you ask someone what the definition of peace is, they are likely to respond, “The absence of conflict.” If that definition is anywhere near the mark, then football is very un-peaceful. It thrives on conflict, rivalry, and high impact collisions. You may argue that football isn’t violent because players willingly sacrifice their bodies. That, of course, is true, but NFL players sustain traumatic injuries that cause the average life expectancy of a player to be – depending on position – 53 to 59.
Indeed, football players are willing to subject themselves to a violent game. And that’s part of the problem. Football players and football fans are unanimous in this sacrifice. As the anthropologist René Girard has taught us, this is how it must be, for the most effective sacrifice is a unanimous sacrifice, where even victims willingly participate in their own demise.
So thanks for destroying the sacrificial unanimity, Madonna. Your message of “World Peace” ruined my Super Bowl experience.
On a related issue, have you heard about the Gisele Bundchen scandal? Bundchen is a supermodel who began dating Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, in December of 2006. Before their relationship, Brady and the Patriots were 3-0 at the Super Bowl; they were poised to become the dominant football dynasty for years to come. But then, as The Business Insider.com states, “Gisele happened. And now look at them: zilch in five years.” Bill Simmons, a Boston sports reporter, claims that in Boston “There's an ‘Us Against Them’ mentality that's just part of the DNA. You grow up there, you live a full life there, you die there. That's how it's supposed to play out. There's been a local undercurrent for the past few years that Brady thinks he's too good for Boston (because he moved to New York, then California), that he cares too much about being a celebrity, that Gisele made him soft, that he's not really ‘one of us.’”
It’s been called “The Gisele Bundchen Curse” in Boston, but the animosity directed against her isn’t isolated to Boston. As I watched the Today Show this morning, they had a segment on Bundchen from the Patriot’s Super Bowl loss in 2008. They showed a clip of Bundchen at that game, sitting in a private booth, “sipping red wine and looking uninterested.” I wondered, why would the Today Show emphasize “red wine”? Well, as one website claims, the red wine was a “Nice way for Gisele to mock American football fans who actually drink beer (not red wine) for the game.”
The accusation that she looked uninterested in the 2008 game is especially interesting, considering her reaction after Sunday’s Super Bowl. When a Giants fan taunted her, saying, “Eli [Manning, the Giants quarterback] rules your husband!” a video camera caught her responding, “My husband cannot f****** throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.” Since the video’s release, Bundchen has been accused of betraying her husband’s teammates and throwing them under the bus. Maybe she was too interested in this Super Bowl.
What does all of this have to do with “World Peace”? The problem is with our definition of peace. When we define peace in negative terms, as the absence of conflict, we will have problems. Conflict is inevitable – as long as there are humans we will have conflict. If we want conflict to be absent from our lives, then we have to expel those that we blame for starting conflicts. So, I want to banish Madonna because she brought up “World Peace” during a football game and Patriots fans want to expel Bundchen because she single handedly brought the downfall of their beloved franchise.
Peace, at least a feeling of peace, often comes at the expense of others. And when peace comes at the expense of others, we will have never have peace.
We will be closer to peace, both in our world and in our personal lives, when we think of peace as a way of life. Peace is hard work. It’s a way of life that seeks justice, healing, love, and reconciliation in a world where our relationships are inevitably infected with conflicts.
So, we need to ask ourselves a question – Do we really want “World Peace”? If we do want peace, the advice of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton is worth heeding:
Instead of loving what you think is peace, love other [humans] and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are war mongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another. (Passion for Peace, 38. Italics in original.)
