Othering and Belonging

"Jeter sucks" their shirts proclaimed.

On a summer afternoon about a dozen years ago, I was standing outside Fenway Park in Boston waiting for a friend. We were using the occasion of a Red Sox game to hang out and catch up on each others' lives. As noted many times, I have a lot of identity attached to Boston -- love that dirty water -- and consequently an attachment to the Sox.

Still, the sight of the happy little family group: father, mother, a couple of kids, moving through the crowd wearing matching shirts reviling perhaps the greatest baseball player of that time and maybe, all time. was jarring.

You may hear people in Boston talking about New York being a rival. The truth is New Yorkers spend no time thinking about the provincial and occasionally charming small city to the north.

Interesting to me is that the word rival comes from the Latin word, rivalis, meaning someone who shares the same stream as I do. The word has come to be identified with a competitor and not as someone who shares the same benefit.

Here I am using sports as a metaphor again because it's a useful proxy for our more consequential identities. Sports rivals share a stream. They have a shared interest in athletic competition, maybe even a highly specific form of athletic competition, and nonetheless have developed a specific identification with one side or another in the competition. At the same time, it's a cooperative endeavor.

In a recent post, I wrote about the power of looking at someone and thinking, friend, and imagining their favorite food. It activates the part of our brain that recognizes another as a fellow human, and makes us more compassionate. Reviling does the opposite. Thinking of another as morally flawed, disgusting, foul, or ugly shuts down that humanizing instinct.

If we think of each other as sharing a stream, we imagine creating mutual benefit. If we think of each other as competing for the stream, we create fear, loathing, and greed.

Derek Jeter played the last game of his illustrious career in the home of his rivals, Fenway Park. Here's how it went down (from Wikipedia),

"Jeter decided to play exclusively as the designated hitter in the final series of his career, at Fenway Park in Boston, so that his final memories of playing shortstop would be at Yankee Stadium.[195] The Red Sox honored Jeter with a pregame ceremony including Red Sox retired stars Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Luis Tiant and Rico Petrocelli, the Boston Bruins' Bobby Orr, New England Patriots receiver Troy Brown and the Boston Celtics' Paul Pierce, while many Boston fans at Fenway Park loudly cheered for Jeter and gave him a standing ovation.[196] In his final at-bat, he hit an RBI infield single against Clay Buchholz, before being substituted for pinch runner Brian McCann;[197] he received an ovation from the Red Sox fans as he exited the field.[198]"

His Red Sox rivals treated him with the dignity of a worthy fellow human at a poignant life transition. They shared the same stream.

We can do it.

People working hard to get us there.

Warm regards,

Francis Sopper

REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:

love that dirty water: https://youtu.be/5apEctKwiD8?si=cU5RLBhcx7KSy2rW

rivalis: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/it-takes-two-the-history-of-rival

designated hitter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_hitter

Fenway Park: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenway_Park

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Jeter

Carl Yastrzemski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Yastrzemski