The first goal was based on a foul! I followed the match closely because I was benched in by office after a bomb warning!
My sister in law had a point. Pavlovic did control the ball by using his incredibly long legs, while Vite dived low with his head. Other referees would've seen a foul, and it would've been fine to not count the goal. Ecuador won 2:1 anyway, which I think is awesome. They played better. It's that easy.
Wait what?
Yeah. The mind is a marvelous thing. Bread and Circus, they say, and Bread and Circus it is. I know that my SIL said it jokingly, but she really was in that situation. And you learn how to cope with it. Emergency situations emerge quite spontaneously.
Until they don't.
"There's an active shooter. Please take cover. XOXO." Or something like that is a practiced scenario at stadiums. Another friend of mine did the whole show of that. Every eventuality. Hurricanes, tornadoes, as if those rose suddenly, as unpredictably as human made "eventualities".
Prepare for everything?
Most people don't get a notice. Violence is just a part of their lives. And yes, most people, most humans. Not just the northern hemisphere, excluding the Asian part. I grew up in a world where it was unfathomable that violence even existed. Every show of it was an exception. Yugoslavia was the first I remember. Far away.
There is no peace. There never was.
That is a core reality that has been withhold from me for most of my life. Coming to Ecuador, settling and starting a life as an immigrant changed that view. There never was peace. In order to preserve peace in one point of the earth, another must fall for violence.
And it's okay.
Once you know what you're dealing with, well, it's easier to deal with it. It's not bad or good or grey, it just is. Deal with it, literally. Everything is based on human connections, through proxies like money or favors or extended kin. Those in the northern hemisphere tend to tell that story of them valiantly bribing an officer of the law to not land in inhumane prison as an exciting history, while for the original population it's just normal.
Privileged judgement.
Most people don't know anything. I included. Even living here for 13 years, consciously exposing myself to the dear horror of normality as if it was a disease that could drag me down, I only have a glimpse of the estimated horrors that are lived here every day. Horrors to me.
Normal to them.
We grow with our experiences. In many directions. Every mind tends to extremism. Positive experiences embellish the world. Negative experiences lead to coping, lowering the bar for what is right in order to accept reality.
It's not right.
Or is it? Bellus and Bellum. We live in a state of war. All the time. Sometimes on all levels, sometimes on some levels, sometimes on few levels. But there is no such thing as peace. And there never will be. As a human trying to strive for a better future, there's that one thing:
Never normalize it.
That is the hardest part. Everything becomes normal when we have to cope. It's good for our peace of mind, but so bad for our selves. For society. For the world.
Stop coping. Please. Review your principles. Cohere. Act.
I tell that to myself every day, and I fail every day. It seems so impossible. It is so impossible. I won't give up, though.
Oh, by the way. The president of Ecuador declared tomorrow a national holiday because the team won and might have qualified for the 16th finals. Yeah. Welcome to a brave new world.
What are your thoughts about this topic? Please feel free to engage in any original way, including dropping links to your posts on similar topics. I'm happy to read (and curate) any quality content that is not created by LLM/AI, as well as read your own experience and point of view, I love to learn!
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