A few
Saturdays ago, I spent the weekend at my father’s in Asbury Park, and I took
advantage of the jet lag to go running on the boardwalk early Saturday morning. Around Belmar, I noticed a few people
starting to assemble on the beach, around my age, or maybe a little younger, in
typical American “casual fitness” gear: some species of stretchy black pants for the women, cargo shorts, baseball hat, and
functionless vest-like-thing for the men.
They didn’t really register as I passed them; I thought it might have
been a yoga class starting to coalesce, or (much more unlikely) a seaside
church group congregating. Though there
is that outdoor
chapel on the boardwalk up in Ocean Grove, so that last thought is not
completely out of the realm.
Anyway,
after turning around in Spring Lake and heading back north, there they
were again, now on the beach, arranged in a square marked off by blue smooth-edged
garbage cans, around 20-25 people on either side, like a chessboard set up by a
hyperactive 5-year-old with a tenuous grasp on the rules. For an instant I thought this arrangement
confirmed my earlier yoga hypothesis, but then someone blew a whistle. A couple of the more athletic guys on either
side sprinted out to the middle of the square, and the scene revealed itself: a
dodgeball game. One of the athletic guys
pegged another guy, who yelled at him, “DUDE! I’m on your TEAM!”
A quick recap: It’s 7am. Sunday morning. 50 or so young people have woken up, gotten
dressed, driven to the beach, and assembled in formation, in order to engage in
an activity typically seen on a middle school playground during recess. Someone brought a whistle.
Questions for
discussion:
- What conclusions (if any) about American culture and priorities can one draw from this scene? Does the concept of Sunday morning as the Sabbath,* a time of rest, contemplation, and thanks-giving, have any relevance or significance anymore?
- Hang on a minute: what’s wrong with a group of young, healthy people gathering on a Sunday morning to engage in some harmless, mildly competitive physical activity? Certainly this is more admirable than sleeping in, or watching infomercials, or lying in bed flicking through one’s Twitter feed, right? And, after all, how do you know that everybody, after a few quick games, didn’t pile into their cars and head to the nearest church for 9am services?
- Okay, fair enough. But might it also be beneficial to examine the role and importance that one’s culture assigns to “fun?” Might it be worth considering the possible relationship between the American desire for constant stimulus, entertainment, and pleasure on the one hand, and the current political state of affairs on the other?**
- Jeez, lighten up, old man. Now you’re going to try to blame Trump’s election on a Sunday morning kickball game (in New Jersey of all places, which, I don’t need to remind you, went heavily for Clinton)? And it’s not like you spent your Sunday morning at home praying the rosary. At least the people on the beach were doing something remotely social.
- All right, fine. But back to my first point: is it worth considering the place of rest, contemplation, and thanks-giving in American life at the moment? Where are the structures or rituals that encourage this? As a thoughtful American, how do you reconcile the elements of American culture on display here, both “good” (community-oriented, active, physical, healthily competitive) and “bad” (hyper-stimulated, overly competitive, immature, irreverent) ? Or perhaps it’s all good, so to speak, and there’s nothing that needs reconciling?
* Yes, I
realize that I’m making assumptions here about the religious demographics of
the dodgeballers. For the sake of argument,
let’s agree that a) there was at least one person out of this group who would
self-identify as Christian, and/or b) you would be just as likely to see a
similar scene on a Sabbath day for any of the other major faiths one might encounter in Monmouth County,
** The short answer is yes, and it's been done already, at considerable length.
