Farr 40 Worlds

This Saturday I had a fascinating experience.  I was one of twenty junior sailors in the Chicagoland area to get to crew on Farr 40 sailboats in one of the days of the world championship being held out of Monroe Harbor.  The top 20 boats in the world who were participating in the event each had one randomly assigned high school sailor in an attempt to get younger racers into big boat sailing.

I was selected to crew on a boat that had traveled in from Turkey.  The crew was made up of a Turkish owner with six hired Turkish hands who spoke almost no English plus three hired Americans.  And me.  When I went to introduce myself to the team, the three Americans were sitting separate from the rest of the crew.  I found it very easy to introduce myself to the Americans, and nearly impossible to the Turks.  Not just because of language. They spoke enough English to understand I was telling them my name, but it was more of a cultural divide.  It was like neither party was comfortable with the other.

As soon as we stepped on the boat however, everything changed.  I would mumble and point at things and they would know exactly what I was asking, they would say something in Turkish and gesture and I would understand exactly what to do.  I wasn't an American thrown into an unfamiliar group anymore.  I was a sailor among sailors.  The language barrier was non-existent because there was so much non-verbal communication and understanding that words were not needed.

It was the first time I had seen culture as something unrelated to heritage.  I've always seen myself as a well an American from a well off suburb, and in that sense I clashed with the Turks.  But now I think my culture is at least as defined by me being a sailor as it is by where I'm from and how I was raised.  When I was in a sailing state of mind, I felt as comfortable with the Turkish team as I would have with someone that had grown up in the same neighborhood as me.

The Great Divide

With the election coming up everyone seems to have picked a side.  Except for a few outliers our country is divided between donkeys and elephants.  Something that really caught my eye was how much members of the facebook community have felt the need to broadcast their alliances, plastering my wall with statuses and memes from each side.  All this has me wondering, why are we so divided?  Why do so many people publicize their opinion of being far to one side, while almost no one publicly looks at all the facts and tries to choose some logical middle ground?

I think that we as Americans often feel obligated to be associated solely with one political group.  It seems to me like people hold the opinion that you are either a democrat, a republican, or you are nobody.  Now I cannot call myself innocent on this matter.  I've grown up in a household of democrats coming from a long line of democrats, and its almost comforting to just call myself a democrat without actually looking and any facts and thinking about why.  Having some opinion, even if uneducated, can feel a lot better than hanging in the middle until you actually have enough information to decide.


I think that our country could be better off if people stopped concentrating so much on their affiliation and more on their own opinions on specific matters.  If you disagree please share your opinion in a comment.

High School Football

An article in the Chicago Tribune caught my eye just a few days ago.  This article, titled "It's Time to Ban High School Football", can be found here.  In the article Ken Reed compares football to smoking, saying that as soon as the dangers of smoking were fully understood, it was banned on campuses all around the country.  He says the new research on brain injuries, showing that about 20 percent of high school football players sustain tissue damage, should put football to a similar fate.  My first instinct was to decide that this is preposterous.  Football has been an integral part of high school for years, and now some parents are overreacting to a bit of a risk.  Next they'll want to keep kids from walking to school because they might get hit by cars.  I also thought about what sports can teach somebody.  I remember seeing the documentary "'Undefeated", which includes the stories of many young men who grew up in unfortunate circumstances and whose lives were reformed by their experiences on the grid iron.  They certainly benefited enough from the game to justify the risk that they took on.  The more I thought about it however, the less certain of my opinion I became.  Most of the country, and certainly New Trier, is very different from the Manassas, Memphis high school shown in Undefeated.  To be honest, at New Trier it doesn't seem to me like the football players have learned any profound life skills from football that couldn't be gained from another sport or interest.  Maybe it would be better for kids if they played less risky sport that still required the commitment and perseverance that football does.  And brain injuries are definitely not something to be taken lightly.  They can have an impact on someone for life, even if acquired as early as high school.  Whatever society ends up deciding on this issue it will have a huge impact on the high school experience.