On July 4th, I took my kids to their first Yankee game. I’ve been a fan since I was 7. My kids are almost four and two, so I was thrilled that they had a blast at the game, since I hope they’ll be lifelong fans.
Every morning, I tell them the outcome of the game, and often fill them in on the Red Sox, too, since they are in a tight battle for first place. When the Yankees lost the other day, my daughter pouted and said, “I’m so sad they lost!” I had to smile, since it meant she was starting to get invested, but it also got me thinking about how to teach about not only winning and losing, but also “us” and “them.” After all, when you go to Yankee Stadium, you hear more than just, “Let’s go Yankees!” You’ll also hear “Red Sox suck!” So how could I teach my kids to be a proud member of “us” without denigrating “them?”
Robert Sapolsky is a psychologist and is the author of the new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. He recently wrote an article in Nautilus entitled “Why Your Brain Hates Other People,” and reminds us that we automatically divide the world into an “us/them” mentality:
Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. And it’s not a pretty picture. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. Pretty depressing.
Excellent blog. I grew up with heartfelt baseball hatreds because as not being a rabbi, I do not have my fervent fandom tempered with the wisdom and perspective of religious training and education. It’s just raw, emotional and heartfelt.
I raised my now-college-aged kids to hate the Yankees, cognizant of the fact that here in Baltimore, the hate is one-way and not reciprocal and therefore, somewhat less delicious. We want to be hated back, and thus, feared. We are not usually feared and just about never hated back, near as we know, for the Orioles have not been consistently competitive since I was in college myself.
Dissecting this, as sitting through a fair number of lopsided Orioles losses has afforded the opportunity to do, we came to realize that part of hatred is rooted in jealousy. Twenty seven rings doubtlessly provides ample ammunition to incur jealously, and the smugness of some Yankees fans who flaunt that achievement, do generate their fare share of hate for their team around the league.
Having been to games in cities where our Orioles might be hated: New York, Boston and Detroit, further affords this perspective. Fans generally are knowledgeable and passionate. They cheer for their team, and they will cheer against an opposing team if the competitive circumstance dictates (we had our brief dallilance with hating Kansas City a few years ago). However, in the end, its only satisfying when we are hated back.
Yankees fans lacking rabbinical training may hate Red Sox fans with justification; their nouveau riche behavior can border on boorishness. We, by comparison, have Toronto to hate and how can anyone reasonably hate Canadians? Recommendation: enjoy your baseball rivalry and let your kids enjoy it too. All of it; even the hatred. Some of us are jealous of that fact that your team has earned the right to be hated.