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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 11/26/09

Afghanistan as Sports Event, Sexual Fantasy and Detour From the Hero's Journey

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Sports, sex and the the hero's journey narrative all play a role in America's perception of our relationship to Afghanistan. President Obama can pander to our baser instincts, tapping the nation's archetypal sports and sexual images and energy to sell what is becoming his war, as he's been doing, or seek a higher road that takes America home to a higher level as a better nation.

The national sport of Afghanistan, Buzkashi, involves horsemen knocking around a headless goat and successfully carrying it across a goal line. Unlike American sports, which last hours, Buzkashi can last days.

Buzkashi; flickr image by zz77

Here in the US, where football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey are the national obsessions, the idea of crossing the goal line, finish line or home plate, dunking or scoring is a major metaphor.

Now, that metaphor is being projected upon Afghanistan.

I should add that my mind is not befuddled, like most American heterosexual males, by sports mania. On the contrary, I have sports attention deficit, an abnormality that led to what came close to child neglect for my two sons, They seem to have survived my "disorder" and are, themselves, quite addicted to baseball, football, cage matches wrestling and the like.

That said, I feel I can see a pattern that most males and maybe even females who live with such normalized madness would not.

The American obsession with crossing the goal or finish line is deeply ingrained.

There's also the Judeo Christian work ethic of doing the job right, finishing the job.

To make matters worse, in terms of feeding into the subconscious of the male psyche, there's even a Freudian aspect to completion-- consumation, penetration, finishing the orgasm...

It's a noble goal for sports and work. It's a biological drive for sexual completion.

But the same metaphor applied to Afghanistan is a big, BIG mistake.

The metaphor is simple in isolation, but there are all kinds of examples where it is just plain bad.

Cheating is not the way to finish. Doing a bad job is not the way to finish.

Playing when it hurts your family or community or costs you your job or health is bad, finish or not. It's selfish, perhaps obsessive.

Then there's addictive behavior-- sports gambling, sexual addiction.

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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