Drinking Poison and Waiting for the Other Person to Die

I’ve reached, in my own woefully subjective opinion, a relative equilibrium in my sports fandom. There exists some happy medium wherein you care enough about a team to experience genuine joy at success without so deep an involvement as to allow a loss, error, or missed shot to torpedo your evening/day/week/life/career. That’s not to say there aren’t moments where I throw my hands up in disgust and leave a room. And playoffs, in their various shapes and forms, still mean all bets are off. But still. I’m more likely to shrug and endure or else change the channel than any genuine outrage. Worst case scenario I’m left with a lingering ‘well that was a waste of three hours’ malaise but this last year, where time has lost all meaning, has blunted even that.

This relative emotional nirvana was a long-time coming. (Non-sports people, bear with me. I promise I’ll eventually reach, or at least asymptotically approach, a point ). I’m born and raised in the DC area and inherited (along with a hyper focus on politics and a low simmering hatred of the weather) its sports fandoms. My dad snuck me out of a class field trip to Colonial Williamsburg to watch our hockey team, the Capitals, during the playoffs in 1998. The Caps made it to the finals before ultimately falling to Detroit in a four-game sweep. The eventual outcome did little to dull my excitement; eight year old me was hooked. What I could not possibly have understood was at the time that seemed fated to be the highpoint of my fandom.

There were wonderful moments (and I was lucky enough to be in the stands for some of them). I was there for the Nationals first game in DC back in 2005 after 35 years without a local team. In 2011 I went to Pittsburgh to see the Caps play in the outdoor Winter Classic. I joined the crowd as Max Scherzer (a Nats’ pitcher) tied a record by striking out 20 batters in a single game. I jumped up and down screaming with friends in our standing-room only seats when Jayson Werth hit a walk-off homerun for the Nats in the bottom of the 9th inning to beat St. Louis in a playoff game in 2012 (an event fondly remembered in DC as the ‘Werthquake’ as the explosion of noise from the ballpark actually registered on local Richter Scales). But the Werthquake preceded what was the trend in DC sports; 24 hours later the Nats blew a 6-0 lead to lose the deciding game in the series and get eliminated from the playoffs.

For years the Nats and Caps routinely competed for the best record during the regular season only to lose in the first or second round of the playoffs and my alma mater UVA’s basketball team repeatedly entered March Madness as a number one seed but never made the Final Four. 2018 felt like a low point. That spring UVA became the first ever one seed to lose to a sixteen seed (the lowest seed in the bracket), and it had been 20 years (counting back to my experience when I was eight years old) since one of the DC professional teams in the four major US sports leagues (football, baseball, hockey, basketball) made it past the second round of the playoffs (much less a championship). Then, suddenly, all of it changed.

The Caps vanquished their long-time nemesis, the Penguins, in overtime in game six of their second round series and then won a hard-fought seven game battle with the Tampa Bay Lightning to make it to the finals. Hockey was the one I wanted most. I played baseball growing up and love the sport, and pour my heart out for UVA basketball. But there’s nothing like the Stanley Cup. Unlike most sports, hockey reuses the same trophy every year, engraving the names of the winning players and team coaches/officials on its base. Each player on the winning team gets a day with the cup- it’s been used for everything from beer to baptisms. But it’s always presented the same way. Two men wearing white gloves bring the Cup out onto a pedestal, the league commissioner comes onto the ice to say a few words and calls over the team captain, the two raise the Cup waist-height together, the commissioner lets go, and the captain raises the Cup over his head, lets out a triumphant roar, and skates a solo lap around the ice before handing it to another teammate.

It’s so easy to visualize because you know exactly how it would look. I’d all but written it off until I stood there in a crowd of thousands outside the arena in DC and watched the Caps score two late goals to beat Vegas and see that most fantastic of fever dreams come to life. A little less than a year later, UVA earned its redemption by winning the championship in overtime. And six months after that the Nationals finished a phenomenal playoffs by taking the lead in the second-to-last inning in the winner-take-all game seven to earn their first World Series championship. Eighteen months erased 30-ish years of heartache as my three favorite teams won for the first (and I wouldn’t be surprised if last) time in my life.

So where are we going with this

I told you that so I can tell you this: I get it. When you criticize sports fans (as, spoiler alert, I’m about to do) the opening move is to attack your bona fides and accuse you of being ‘not a real fan.’ The invective is crucial here. The phrase is pronounced with the implicit understanding this is the most cardinal of sins and one for which Dante reserved a special, even deeper, circle of Hell (I never read The Inferno. Maybe they’re right). So when I say this it’s from a place of compassionate understanding and impeccable credentials: what is wrong with you people? I spent the first few days of last week absolutely seething at some of the fan reaction following an incident in a Capitals/New York Rangers game last week.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the incident itself- I’ve already burned 6-7 paragraphs on local sports in what is ostensibly a storytelling/literature blog. But a quick recap to set the stage. A player on the Capitals has a (not underserved) reputation for borderline hits. Sometimes these hits are within the normal bounds of a game or result in a standard penalty. Other times the league feels they are more severe and it levies a fine or suspension. This scenario played out again last Monday and the league decided to fine (but not suspend) the player. I wouldn’t have been opposed to a suspension (less for the incident itself, more to act as a deterrent due to the pattern of behavior) but it’s not an understatement to say hockey social media absolutely lost its mind at both the event and the lack of severe punishment.

I realize reading the comments is never a good idea but I was wholly unable to look away. Half the comments either invented or exaggerated a description of the chain of events. I’m all for reasoned debate on consequences, but to do so we need to agree on a common set of facts. I experienced genuine emotional crises at how two people can watch the same video and provide wildly divergent descriptors. I know loud voices are amplified; outrage draws attention while emotion-neutral language doesn’t get clicks. But still. The other half of the comments (and finally, the point of this post) called for retaliatory violence to either the perpetrating player or his teammates. Those voicing these opinions seemed united in their belief that such actions were not only warranted but righteous manifestations of fairness or justice.

Revenge is not justice

It’s easy to pick on sports fans. Calling for the intentional injury of another human due to outrage stemming from the events taking place in what is, after all and quite literally, just a game is so obviously ludicrous that most can see the absurdity of the viewpoint. But this mindset is less easy to waive away when we move beyond the sports world. One of the popular pages on the message board hosting website Reddit purports to show instances of ‘justice served’; I’m usually repulsed by its content. Most of the videos depict retaliatory and often disproportionately violent responses. And most of the commenters clap each other on the back, say how they would have done worse, and point out how the person ‘deserved it’ because they started it.

I’m not going to waive away the concept of self defense. But self defense means an attempt to protect yourself from harm, not retaliation for harm already done. If someone hurts me (physically or emotionally) and walks away, I don’t get to hurt them back. I understand the emotions- the anger, pain, embarrassment, and frustration. The temptation to lash out to make them feel what you’re feeling, or have them understand. And I get the desire for consequences for wrongdoing. But we’re not describing justice; we’re describing revenge.

Of all the sayings concerning revenge (and they are nothing if not legion) my favorite is something akin to ‘holding on to anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.’ I would attribute the quote if I could but a quick Google search credits variations to St. Augustine, the Buddha, or Carrie Fischer (esteemed company all). All this to say there’s nothing wrong with a good revenge tale. Inigo Montoya’s quest for the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride or the movie Lucky Number Slevin. But stories seem to agree with this misattributed mantra, especially for those who couch their actions in the language of righteousness. Very rarely does the protagonist follow his or her initial plan to fruition with what I would deem a positive outcome. Instead these stories resolve into one of two general scenarios.

Scenario One: Scorched Earth

This category is fairly self explanatory but not once in my life have I let a lack of need of explanation stop me giving one, and I certainly will not start now. The protagonist (often after a death) conjures a grand or convoluted plan to enact vengeance. The protagonist is given several chances to turn away by increasingly concerned loved ones, but, under the misguided mantra of ‘to thine own self be true,’ continues down their preselected path. The revenge is ‘successful’ but at great cost to the protagonist, the remaining loved ones, and often the larger cause. Hamlet (from which I drew that recent quote) is a textbook example. (Heads up I’m not going to skimp on the spoilers for the stories I reference for the rest of this post). After the murder of his father, the king, and the remarriage of his mother to his father’s killer, Claudius, Hamlet (with light ghost prodding) concocts an elaborate plan for revenge.

Feigning madness, Hamlet stages a play to ascertain Claudius’ guilt. Gradually the feigned ‘antic disposition’ become real with Hamlet increasingly isolated from those around them. His revenge is ultimately successful- he kills Claudius. But his plan leads to his own death along with those of the advisor Polonius, Polonius’ daughter/Hamlet’s love-interest Ophelia, Ophelia’s brother Laertes, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and Hamlet’s admittedly duplicitous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet was still in line for the throne, and could have turned away at any moment to be with Ophelia. Instead he ended the royal family and effectively handed the throne to Fortinbras, prince of the rival kingdom of Norway.

I would put Inigo Montoya in this same category. Mind you I love the character. Mandy Patinkin’s delivery of his opening ‘Hello’ to the closing ‘I want my father back you son of a bitch’ ranks among my favorite movie moments. But the character threw away his life for revenge. Yes- he dedicated himself to the sword and, per the canon, became the only living man with the rank ‘wizard’ (one level above ‘master’). But he also spent years in an alcoholic and depressive haze (the state in which he was ‘rescued’ by the Sicilian, Vizzini). All that was left for him at the end of the story was a life of murder and piracy as the new Dread Pirate Roberts. Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Mattie Ross in True Grit. Revenge comes with a heavy price.

Scenario Two: Another Path

Here the protagonist takes the proffered olive branch and adopts more of a ‘the best revenge is a life well-lived’ policy. It’s rarely an easy choice- and there’s usually a period where the protagonist knows it’s the right one but struggles to let go of the past. The good news here- these are stories. Unlike real life the villain still faces consequences, often because, not in spite of, the protagonist’s choice to turn aside. In The Hobbit Bilbo passes on his chance to kill the creature Gollum as he flees the mountain with the One Ring. Later, in the Lord of the Rings, when Frodo says to Gandalf that Bilbo should have done it, Gandalf famously responds with ‘many who live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them’? He goes on to imply that Gollum has a part yet to play, and sure enough without Gollum (and his eventual betrayal), Frodo and Sam would not have been able to destroy the Ring.

Kaladin Stormblessed in The Stormlight Archive (and I’ll go gently with spoilers here- it’s a new enough series that I’ll wade but not submerge) loathes those in the light-eyed caste above him. Regardless of justification (and there are plenty, some more valid than other) this hatred eats away at him. He learns lesson after lesson that it’s not this resentment defining or fueling him but he’s still captive to it. He cannot progress as a person or a Knight Radiant without embracing freedom from this seething mass within him. Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen could bring the ‘villain’ to light but instead chooses to walk away and start a literally new life somewhere else (coincidentally the exact opposite of Rorschach, who mailed his journal prior the final confrontation).

So what do we do about it?

Honestly I don’t know. As I mentioned earlier life isn’t a story and, like a lot of you and for a whole host of reasons, I wish it were so. I struggle so badly with the ideas of punishment or justice. I’m vehemently opposed to the death penalty, and even the concept of prisons makes me uneasy. I understand the need to pursue closure, and that we live by the social contract (violation of which leads to consequences). On the one hand- I’m not sure what it solves. The idea of letting someone walk away unpunished makes me uncomfortable but so does locking someone away. I mentioned in a previous post about my recent playthrough of the game Persona 5. Your character is part of a team whose objective is to steal a corrupt person’s mental treasure thereby forcing them into a change of a heart. Once you’re successful the person feels the full weight of their actions and is forced to confront them and make whatever effort they can at recompense.

One of the more famous pieces of magic in Harry Potter is called a horcrux. When one commits a murder they rip a piece of their soul away from the whole. The witch or wizard can seek to use this self harm to his or her advantage- locking away that fragment into an object to safeguard their life should their body be destroyed. The only way to repair a soul, we learn, is through remorse. Genuine, earnest remorse- the pain of which can kill you. We’re all touched by stories of someone who learns and grows from their mistakes and wrongs. What I don’t know- what comes next? What happens if someone earnestly changes but has months or years or decades of punishment remaining? Should victims be required to forgive? Should that have any bearing at all on the punishment? I love this idea of the change of heart from Persona or Harry Potter. What I’m hoping for are ideas on what to do with them after.

Thoughts, feedback, ideas? Let me know in the comments.