Kicking Butt

My basketball team lost last night. I was so bummed.

But I am thinking, why are they my team. I don’t play on it. I don’t even go see them. I just watch them on TV. But they play twenty miles from my house. That makes them mine? Hey, these guys don’t even live here. One guy is from Texas and the two with the long names, from Europe. But I get excited for them. And bummed when they lose.

That happens at work too. We have a project-team. I don’t like two of the guys but we eat pizza when we hit a milestone. And we kick butt over the other teams.

Teams seem like a trick to make us work hard or cheer or buy more beer. But it sure works. It’s wired in, like loving your mom and punching your brother. Your brain loves teams.

Teams must have started a long, long time ago, back when we kicked butt everywhere. We must have because our ancestors made it and the kickees didn’t. We had one big mama who had a big, big papa. We were brothers. We had lots of relations who walked like us, talked like us and took other peoples’ stuff. That’s really living. Sort of like high school.

Team stuff is everywhere. Waving flags and cheering. I did it on July Fourth. For my big team—the U S of A. It’s my nation-team. I pledge allegiance to one nation and we kick butt.

Nations do more than play games, they tell team stories. They try hard to remember their big mama. The Germans had a great story for Mr. Hitler and still sing it every year; the English have their Normans; the Slavs their Boleslaw; the French their Marianne Liberty leading the revolution with her droopy dress-top. Every bunch of folks with a special nose twist or chin size or hair color called themselves a nation. And get this--every nation had its own race only one hundred years ago. Now there are only a couple races and scientists know everything is just a mish-mash, anyway.

We don’t all look alike here in the U S of A. We are not a race, even an old-time race like the Russians and Swedes think they are. Nope, we are a mish-mash. But we are a nation because those French revolutionaries changed what nation meant. They kicked out relations who were goof-off aristocrats and did not include those guys in their Nation. O.K. they never invited else in (except that Corsican guy), but got the idea going that Nations are not blood; they are not race; they are just folks who think alike and kick butt of people who think different.

I am thinking that this kicking butt stuff is not really that good. Now we try not to kick butt and we just can’t help it. I think it is because of our built-in team spirit. I know the principal made you go to team spirit day in the 9^th grade, but it’s time to cool it. Especially, now because every nation-team has bombs and big planes and the big league guys have A-bombs too. They roast butt.

Stopping butt-kicking is hard because it’s wired in. We need to snip some wires.

I have a plan, but first I want to tell you a story. I used to live in Baltimore and listened to the Colts on my new three-transistor radio. (It was a while back.) Then I left Baltimore and left Alan the Horse Amechi and Lenny Sputnik Moore. I left my team. I went to San Francisco and became a hippie and even made money off my new team, the 49ers, when I rented out my driveway for parking during games. But I never felt like it was my team. And Baltimore wasn’t either, anymore. I didn’t care who kicked butt.

We need to be like I was and move away from our team every once and a while.

I have a plan to make that happen: Every year there is a lottery. The winners get $50K and a free pass to a randomly chosen country. Just they can’t come back. Not ever. Or at least for ten years. And there are lots of winners. Five percent of the country wins every year. And in a decade or two, they have a name for the losers: Homebodies—and it’s not such a nice name either. So homebodies try to figure out how to stack the odds and be a winner too.

The winners can take their family. They get a job that’s now empty in their new nation because someone there won too and had to leave. Everywhere people win and move. Maybe we give them a year off to learn the language, try the food and go to the beach.

But everybody gets confused. Which team are they on? Who knows? Which butt to kick? It’s hard to figure out.

But that’s OK with me.