Okay, so maybe we're NOT all the best people

Photo by Morgan Basham on Unsplash

“Hey,” my friend emailed me last week, “you know that post you wrote about how we’re all good people? You missed some things.”

She proceeded to share with me a story about her kid’s rec soccer team that got creamed, to the tune of 20-0, and the victors were pretty ugly about it. The losing coach went over to the winning team and said, “Hey, this was a rough loss for these kids. Could you be a little nicer about it?” And a parent from the winning team jeered at him, called him a sore loser, and proceeded to verbally abuse him and FOLLOW HIM OUT OF THE PARKING LOT CONTINUING TO ABUSE HIM.

So there was that.

Two days after that post went live, my family went to a college football game. Three of us wanted to see football and marching band; one of us (me) was there for the marching band and the drone show; the last (my chromosomally-gifted daughter) was along for the ride.

We do not often spend money on sporting events, so it was a big deal. And the stadium was sold out. So when the group of 8-10 drunk guys in front of us started vaping (against stadium rules, with total disregard for everyone around them), there was nowhere to go. My husband asked them to stop and they didn’t. So, after ten or fifteen minutes of this, he went for an usher. But the ushers decided this might require law enforcement. When the officer arrived, that group of 8-10 drunk guys showed very clearly that they were NOT the “best people.”

I’ve never experienced anything like the hour and a half that followed. For the first few minutes, I was screamed at, at length and repeatedly, about what a horrible, worthless human being my husband was. My husband was called another name for a cat, along with a slur about his sexual preferences that the teens view as so heinous, they won’t even say it out loud anymore. (Also repeatedly.) These men jeered, “Who beat you up in the third grade?” They made fun of us for plugging our ears when the recorded music was played at a volume so loud that the scoreboard frame was vibrating. They did not participate in the cheers that the marching band leads throughout the game.

There was a lot of shouting about violations of personal liberty, and great offense taken because the young guy who’d been called out by law enforcement had just come home from military service (and thus, I suppose, should be exempt from being considerate of others or following stadium rules?).

I mean, nobody likes to be called out and asked to quit doing something. I get it. It stings. But to quit vaping, when it’s against the rules, in a crowded space, is not an unreasonable ask. And for them to escalate in this way just shows… I could put a lot of names on it, and I’ll bet my readers can, too. But it all boils down to: I can’t handle being challenged to own up to my faults, so I will turn it around on you and pretend I am the victim. Persecution complex, outrage porn, toxic masculinity… (I couldn’t do it, I had to name some of them. Some.)

After I spent a few minutes doing the mom thing to a 60-year-old guy and telling him to calm down and let it go, my husband and I both decided, without consulting each other, to go non-responsive and just look over the guys’ heads and try to watch the game we’d paid a lot of money to see. You can imagine that for the next five plays, I didn’t even have the brain power to know which team had the ball. I remember looking at the “1” at one end of the chains and the “10” at the other and and thinking I should be able to put it together, but I couldn’t get there, mentally.

But eventually, the abuse calmed, with a single resurgence when the military guy who’d been called out came back. To his everlasting credit, that young guy went straight to my husband, stuck out his hand, and apologized.

I hoped that would be the end of it, and for all but the 60-year-old problem guy right in front of us, it seemed to be. But that man spent the rest of the second quarter and the entire halftime show turned around on his bench, staring silently, arms folded, at me and my husband in turn, clearly hoping to provoke us. You know how long a televised football quarter is. And halftime. When someone does that to you from a distance of two feet, just barely outside your personal space, it feels VERY much like a threat. We did not take the bait. Not even when he pulled out his phone and started taking pictures of my husband.

When the halftime show was over, an older man—he had to be 80—came down the row to talk to my husband. I hadn’t, until then, been sure this man was actually part of their group. The problem guy scooted in close, with some comment I didn’t entirely catch because I was trying to tune him out, but which sounded something like “in case he needs backup.”

It transpired that this older gentleman was the grandfather of the military guy, and he wanted to know what had happened. When my husband said he was concerned about our daughter’s health and that he’d asked them to stop vaping before he went for security, this older gentleman (to HIS everlasting credit) apologized again.

This, of course, didn’t sit well with the problem guy, who launched into another diatribe about how my daughter should just stay home if she can’t handle people blowing smoke in her face. (I mean, in fairness, that’s not what he said, but that’s what he was saying. It was that whole thing about “my right not to be uncomfortable in a mask during a pandemic is more important than your health,” all over again.)

Now, by this time I was pretty sure what kind of person I was dealing with, but I didn’t actually know. I knew it was a risk to invoke faith, but I decided this was a moment, if ever there was one, to take that risk. If I’m going to be mad when supposed Christians use Christianity as a bludgeon on others while not actually being willing to do the hard work of living it themselves, sooner or later I have to go beyond the confines of Substack.

So I said, in a tone as heavy with irony as I could muster, “Well, that’s a real Christian attitude you’re showing there.”

He puffed up and started shouting about how yes, he was a GREAT Christian, a DEEP Christian, and he would have gone on, but I wasn’t going to stand for that. “Well, you aren’t acting like it,” I said. I reminded him that Jesus told us to put others ahead of ourselves, and that my daughter’s health is more important than his desire to vape. (To be clear, I wasn’t super-comfortable with making my daughter’s health the center of all of this, but that’s where it had gone, with or without my approval.)

Hearing my statement, the patriarch turned to the problem guy and said, “That’s correct. Now they’re getting ready to leave, so just calm down.”

And we did leave, because it was 9 p.m., we still had to walk to the car and drive home, the team was crushing their opponents, and two of my kids had 7 a.m. band rehearsals the next morning.

So.

Yes. We are all “the best people”—when we choose to be. When we choose to truly BE the Imago Dei.

But when we don’t, some pretty ugly and un-Christlike things happen.

My family spent the drive home processing it all. My husband told us that at another sporting event a few years ago, when it was just him and the boys, the people around them had been screaming obscenities and he didn’t say anything, because he didn’t want to ruin the evening with conflict. Later, because he worked at the university, he had a chance to talk to the people who run the sporting events, and they said, “Don’t EVER let a fan’s bad behavior ruin your experience. Come find an usher. That’s what they’re there for.”

He also pointed out that what these men had done to us was bullying. “There’s no way we were the only people who were bothered by those guys vaping,” he said. “But nobody wants to make waves, so nobody says anything, and then the bullies always get their way while everyone else suffers.”

How depressingly, heartbreakingly relevant does that observation feel in light of the political headlines from the last week?

I told the kids that they’d had two lessons in consideration for and awareness of others tonight, because earlier that night we’d been on the other side of this dynamic. Most of the crowd was on its feet for the start of the game, including my youngest, and I became aware that the woman behind him, who was sitting, was unhappy that she couldn’t see, but didn’t want to be a jerk to a 12-year-old. So I pointed out the woman behind him and told him to sit. Then I realized he wouldn’t be able to see, so we rearranged so that he could. And we had perfectly lovely interactions with that woman throughout the whole game. No hard feelings, just mutual thoughtfulness.

Shocker! Competing interests don’t have to become battles for dominance. Just be thoughtful of others. It’s like Jesus knew what he was talking about or something!

“This is what it means to be a good person, a good citizen, and a good Christian,” we told the kids.

I felt some chagrin the next morning when I realized that my 12-year-old had been really scared through the whole thing. I’d had enough mental and emotional bandwidth to manage myself and to put an arm around my daughter when she, uncharacteristically, wanted to snuggle through a lot of it. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she’s extremely emotionally intelligent. And I had just enough left to know that my 15-year-old was upset, and to move him away from the men when he asked. But not enough to properly mother them in the moment.

And yet in the main, I’m glad for this experience, even if it was a tough night in many ways. I pray that for my boys, at least, it solidifies in their psyche the point that being a follower of Jesus has to mean something in the real world.

I have more thoughts on that, but this has been brutally long, and I thank you all for sticking with me. I’d love to continue the discussion in the comments.