CSotD: Be the best that you can be! Or not.
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With all the election stuff going on, the current Edge City arc has gone longer without my flagging it than it might otherwise have, but, then again, it was shaping up as merely something about competitive sports. Now, with this strip, I'm not so sure they're not drilling a little deeper. They've been known to do so.
The story is that Colin was tapped for a competitive soccer league — which, by the way, required substantial parental investments of time and money — and was very flattered until he found himself on the bench instead of out on the field.
Strictly on the surface, it's a concept worth exploring. When I was coaching rec league soccer, among the things we learned in training was that the best way to discipline players is not by making them run laps or wind sprints but to sit them down.
Exercise as a punishment gives them some time to build resentment while they work out, and also teaches them that exercise is a bad, undesireable thing.
But they spend time on the bench thinking how much they'd rather be on the field. They may hate you for benching them, if you were sarcastic or too punitive or just, generally, a jackass about it, but they're more likely to connect cooperative behavior with playing time. Bingo.
Kids go out for a sport because they want to play.
One of the most powerful lessons I learned at Notre Dame came from observing the athletes. The campus is full of former whatevers, as indicated in this strip that fellow-Domer Dave Kellett did for the student paper in his day:
Where the lesson came was not in trying to pick up girls, but, rather, in watching how the guys on the football team dealt with the conflict Colin is experiencing in this week's Edge City arc: They were used to being the Big Star and now they were Hey You.
Some dug in deeper and triumphed. Although that movie is mostly bullshit, there were certainly players who stepped up when they were pushed to prove their mettle.
There were others who, instead, freaked out and became really obnoxious off the field — hard-drinking bullies and campus buffoons. Not a lot of them made it to senior year.
But I knew one fellow, a second- or third-string runningback, who transferred to Miami of Ohio, where he became a starter and something of a campus celebrity. Which beats the heck out of spending four years picking splinters out of your butt.
And it's not just about sports.
Too many parents and teachers give kids the message that "the college of your choice" means "the hardest school that will admit you," as if that were the only measure.
And, predictably, they respond to getting into that slightly-over-their-head competitive college in one of those aforementioned three ways: (1) Rising to the challenge, (2) freaking out and flunking out or (3) transferring to a place where they can feel they are contributing without killing themselves.
When it comes to potentially getting in over your head, there are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself, but the main one has to be "Who am I doing this for?"
And most 17-year-olds don't know the answer to that, and some never do quite figure it out.
When I dropped out of school early in my senior year, my grandfather applauded the decision, since he could see, even from a distance, that I was flailing (and there are two Ls in that word).
He told me that he knew a guy in the army who had gone all the way through law school, passed the bar and hung out his shingle before he realized he didn't want to be a lawyer. He joined the army, my grandfather surmised, as a graceful way to climb out of the hole he'd dug for himself.
Which is better than figuring it out after you've got the wife, the big house, the picket fence, the four kids, the minivan, the 70-hour work week and the burning sense in your gut that none of it is really making you happy.
And speaking of things that can make you miserable:
"The Norm" cartoonist Michael Jantze is trying to raise funds to defend himself and his wife against what appears to be a nuisance lawsuit that would be extremely expensive if it succeeded, but is going to be somewhat expensive even if it fails.
I've looked over the court papers and don't quite understand everything that happened, which in itself suggests that he's going to have to get someone who can sort it all out for a jury, if it goes that far.
Most of the fundraisers you see on-line are for the money to publish collections or new projects. This one is simply to pay for that someone who can get a good guy out of a tough situation. Check it out here.
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