Editorial: Reasons to be thankful in 2022
When I was a young boy, growing up a Catholic in northern New Mexico, I played a variety of sports. I ran track and played basketball and lacrosse. In fact, my favorite sport was lacrosse. I was a fast skater, like an NFL offensive lineman—only more graceful, more graceful than the best offensive lineman on the team. I was also a good athlete, always out front and doing well in school. I started playing lacrosse in high school while I was in seventh grade. The school was trying to get kids interested in sports so they would get better grades. I kept taking up the sport in high school, but I was always so behind in school that I kept dropping out. I was always having to move up by a semester or two. I took up the sport again in college, but again, it was a struggle. I had a lot of homework as a freshman English major. I took up lacrosse to help with that after a few weeks of school. In the end, though, I still couldn’t keep up. I had about half of high school and a little over a semester of college in which to make it, and I was still always behind. After a while, I’d hear people in the stands calling me lacrosse boy for being in the back of the pack.
Lacrosse was a game I loved, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also gotten more cynical about sports and their effects on society. I’m not against sports, I just think we need to be careful about which ones we choose and how we participate. We need to ask ourselves and others of what kind of impact are we playing? My point here isn’t to bash sports. Sports have allowed me to meet so many wonderful people and, for what it’s worth, the very best people I know are sports fans. However, I think that those people, like myself, live in a society with too many rules and too little choice. The more people we try to fit into this mold, the more we create ourselves, and in turn, the worse we feel at the end of the day. So many of the rules and regulations we have in this society come from a place of self-interest, not from a place of social responsibility. We are often more concerned with our own interests and how to get along