Opening Our Doors To Pure Joy
Pure joy. That is something that our nation hasn’t experienced collectively for a long time. We’ve been too ideologically divided. What pleases one half of the country frustrates the other half.
But pure joy can be felt nearly every day from mid-June to mid-July as the US, Canada, and Mexico host the World Cup, the celebration of the most popular game in the world—soccer or, as most of the world calls it, football.
I confess that I’ve been a mediocre fan of soccer. We Americans are used to sports that produce high scores. Professional basketball games normally boast scores in the low one hundreds. Football generally produces scores in the twenties to the sixties. Baseball too finds fans preferring home runs, especially the grand-slam homer, to low scoring pitchers’ duels or squeeze bunts.
In contrast, a score of 1-0 or even 0-0 is common in soccer. Consequently, soccer asks for more patience and interest in other facets of the game beyond the scoring that we Americans are used to.
My appreciation of soccer has clearly been strengthened with the World Cup, however. It isn’t that there are more goals in the World Cup than at other times with soccer. What is different is the excitement and joy of the spectators in the stands. Stadiums in the US, Canada, and Mexico are literally pulsing with the chants, shouts, whistles, claps, and horns from fans from around the world.
The competing teams to this point in the tournament are a mix of the best in the world and lesser squads from some of the world’s smaller countries. The best teams have mostly advanced to the next round, while the lesser teams have gone home or will go home shortly.
Yet, here’s what I’ve observed. The fans supporting lesser teams are still having a ball, despite their teams losing. For fans from countries like Haiti, Iran, and South Africa, just seeing their teams being in the World Cup is a victory. These fans drape themselves in their flags and celebrate every time their team takes a shot at the goal, despite those shots rarely finding the net.
The World Cup has been a particularly welcome, though ironic, experience for our country. We are a nation that’s always seen itself separated from and above the rest of the world. Of late, we have walled ourselves in and have increasingly hunted down and pushed out people we consider unlike us. The current administration even threatened to sic ICE on people who might come out of hiding to attend World Cup games featuring their native-born countries.
With multiple TV networks covering the World Cup, we who watch observe something important, that visitors from other countries are more joy-filled than we are. And by sharing their joy with us, they have elevated the mood in our country.
We hear, for example, that visitors coming to the games are surprised at how hospitable Americans are. They find us friendly and welcoming. They think it’s special that they can buy food in gas stations and can come back for drink refills in many restaurants. And apparently, our visitors have fallen in love with ranch dressing. Their joy at things we take for granted has rubbed off. We Americans are lapping up the happiness of our guests.
The World Cup will soon be over, and the fans and teams will have returned home. I’m quite certain we will miss the good feelings that have circulated throughout Canada, Mexico, and the US.
Perhaps, the experience will encourage us to rethink the isolation that we Americans normally experience. And perhaps we’ll remember that when we opened our doors, joy flooded in.