Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (20 page)

The weird thing, however, is that I need only one person to know it, and that’s myself. I’m the only person who can truly judge if I gave it everything I had, if I really was the best. Sure, it’s nice if other people notice, but they don’t know everything that’s gone into anything I’ve done. I’m the only one who knows that, who truly knows if I put in the effort necessary.

I’m the only one who honestly knows if what I achieved was for real.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don’t view life this way. There are a lot of people who want to be the hero, but for a very different reason. There are a lot of people who think that if they fool people into believing in them, the ends justify the means.

Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Joe Paterno; political hacks and religious hypocrites of all shapes and sizes; any of the countless steroid users and god-mode enablers and outright cheaters who
think that getting the numbers equates to getting the victory, who are willing to do whatever it takes outside the lines because they don’t actually care about winning. They think they care about the winning, but they want the reward, the recognition, the spotlights and snapshots as they chase a goal they’ll never attain.

Their hero?

Not themselves, or anyone else. No, their hero is a myth, a falsehood, a belief that the approval of self can be attained from the adulation of others, because who knows any heroes who weren’t famous? We wouldn’t know whom to look up to if they were unknown, after all.

Unfortunately, when they find the spotlight, the fame and fortune, there’s always that little nagging sensation in the backs of their minds, that hollow pit lurking in their stomachs. Some bury it deep, but it’ll never go away completely, that one tiny refrain.

Would I have been good enough to do this on my own? Would I have been good enough to win the right way?

The answer is:
You’ll never know.

You’ll never know if you had what it takes to be a hero. You’ll never know what it feels like to be the best, the very best in the world, at something without having to cheat. You’ll never know what you were truly capable of because you never trusted in yourself enough to believe—to believe that you could rise up to the challenge, any challenge, no matter how great or impossible the odds. You’ll never know that unadulterated feeling of triumph that comes with victory, not over others, but over yourself.

You’ll never know what it is like to do the right thing.

I pity these people. Their victory is not the victory of fair play, of being better than another, of striving to achieve and succeeding. Their victory is actually a defeat for themselves and all the
people around them, people who actually thought these cheaters were heroes, people whose trust and hope has been repaid with lies and disillusionment.

People ask me, “Who is your hero?”

My answer, my true answer, is that
I
am my hero, the me I aspire to be, the very best at everything I put my hand to, treating people with dignity and respect because it’s the right thing to do, surmounting obstacles with justice and empathy and compassion. I don’t need anyone else to live my life for me, to mold me, to tell me what is or isn’t possible. I don’t need a path to follow.

I create my own path. I live up to my own dreams. I demand greatness of mind, body, and spirit, not someone else’s, but my own.

I am my own hero. Are you yours?

My life is not your life.

My dreams are not your dreams.

My roses are not your red; my violets are not your blue.

Though we may intersect, converge, overlap

Though we may instantly agree on a great many things

I am not you.

You are not me. Nor do I want you to be.

Your laughs, your tears, your triumphs and despairs

These are yours to savor and share

To hide if you wish them hidden

To display in besplendored regalia

To tease out one sly smile at a time.

You can be only you.

I can be only me.

If we were the same

What a boring world it’d be.

Dear Supreme Court Justices Alito, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Sotomayor, and Thomas,

I am writing an amicus curiae to this court on the matter of same-sex marriage in order to satisfy both the dictates of my conscience and the requirements of basic social stability.

My occupation is a professional football player. For far too long, male professional sports have been a bastion of bigotry, intolerance, and small-minded prejudice, both racially and sexually. Sports figures are afforded celebrity status (a situation that merits an entirely separate letter), which allows them to influence a large majority of the American population. Without intending to be derogatory, I would wager that the number of people who can name all eleven starting offensive or defensive players on their favorite football team is much higher than
the number of people who can name even half of your esteemed court (if they could be bothered to use Google, those figures might go up—but I digress).

Why do I bring this up? Because we are finally starting to change. The NFL, NHL, MLB, and, to a lesser extent, the NBA are finally speaking out against homophobia and intolerance of LGBTQ individuals. More and more of us realize that words like
faggot
and
queer
are demeaning slurs and that using the term
gay
in a pejorative way can have consequences.

Not necessarily consequences for us. Consequences for the young children and adults who look up to us as role models and leaders. Consequences for young children and adults who mimic our behavior when they interact with other children and adults.

Consequences for other young children and adults who might be gay.

These consequences can be drastic: Verbal and emotional abuse. Physical abuse. Loss of job or family members. Suicide. Murder. What does it say about our society when we condone these actions, whether explicitly or implicitly? When we advance the idea that some people should be treated differently because of who they are, should be demeaned in public as lesser beings?

We’ve asked, and answered, that question several times before, frequently with blood.

This is the first reason I am asking you to consider carefully your judgments in the cases of Proposition 8 and DOMA. Your
stance, your legal reasoning, will be used by countless people, including athletes, to justify their actions. Athletes are not stupid (at least, most of us aren’t). We pay attention to what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in politics. We’re citizens of this country just like everyone else, and just like everyone else, we see the legal verdicts of the Supreme Court as powerful indicators of acceptable behavior.

If you decide to overturn the appeal of Prop 8 (boy, that’s a cumbersome one), if you decide to uphold the tenets of DOMA, a lot of professional athletes will take their cues from that, and it will cause a ripple effect as even more people follow their role models, their leaders, their heroes. Those against same-sex marriage will use it as yet another tool to propagate the idea that gay Americans, citizens who pay their taxes and serve in our military, are less than equal. That they don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else. That separate can be equal.

Those for same-sex marriage? They’ll see it as proof, not that justice is blind in this country, but rather that justice doesn’t exist anymore. I would encourage a study of historical societies in which minority groups came to feel that they had no recourse under the legal system; note the actions that were left to members of these groups, as well as how this ended up affecting society in the long run. Some modern examples include Iran, Egypt, Russia, and the United States from 1850 to 1970.

The second reason I’m asking for your consideration is that I believe a strong case can be made for this country’s vested
interest in its citizens having more freedom, not less. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to guarantee the rights of the individual and protect him from persecution by the government. They knew firsthand the tyranny of government turned against a minority and knew what it led to; I’m fairly certain tea was involved at some point. These men were influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, and their underlying goal clearly shines through as freedom. The Ninth Amendment serves as perhaps the best example, specifically stating that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution does not take away from the people other rights that are not listed. At every step, the desire for freedom rings out.

However, our founders forgot some things. They weren’t omniscient; they couldn’t see the future, and sometimes they were blinded by social mores of the time. They tried their best, but some stuff—well, some stuff they missed. Stuff like prohibiting slavery, allowing women to vote, removing economic disincentives to vote. Stuff that we later fixed, because we knew it was wrong. Not wrong because of a particular religious or moral creed, but wrong because it disenfranchised citizens of this country, citizens who help make this country great. Wrong because it didn’t uphold that great central philosophy—equality and freedom.

Minor v. Happersett. Plessy v. Ferguson.
Citizens denied equal protections under the law. Citizens denied, by the highest court in the land, the same rights as everyone else. Citizens discriminated against for no reason other than that they were who they were. Decisions later overturned, reviled today as ignorant and petty, looked back on as examples of what not to do.

Brown v. Board of Education. Loving v. Virginia
. Equality, respect, tolerance. Our Supreme Court sending the message “It does not matter who you are, what the circumstances of your birth, we hold you to be just as equal as everyone else.” Decisions lauded and taught in schools as the pinnacle of just law.

Hollingsworth v. Perry. United States v. Windsor.

What will our future generations say about these cases? Will our children look back with pride? Will they applaud our efforts to strive for more equality, not less? Or will they shake their heads and decry our small-mindedness, our petty factionalism—America divided against itself yet again, fighting the same old stupid fight with the same old worn-out arguments?

Justices, I would ask that you hold this ideal in the forefront of your thoughts as you deliberate on these two cases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Thank you.

Chris Kluwe

American Citizen

Punter

A
logic paradox I hear a lot is the time-traveler scenario, and it goes a little like this: “If time travel is possible within this universe and one can travel back to the past and potentially alter the future, why haven’t we seen any time travelers?” It’s a good question, seems to make sense on the surface, but, aside from the obvious explanation (time travel isn’t possible; nerds everywhere wail and gnash their teeth), I believe there’s another possibility that makes sense.

We haven’t seen any time travelers because we haven’t invented a time-travel method yet.

In order for time travelers to exist, they must have some way to reverse the normal causal chain of events (for example, a machine with wibbly-wobbly bits, or mysterious meditation techniques, or an eighteenth-dimension wormhole), and (here’s the important
part)
they cannot travel any farther back in time than the very first implementation of that method
. We’ll call that Point Zero, mainly because it sounds pretty cool.

The reason they can’t go past Point Zero is that if they do, they change the circumstances leading up to the creation of that time-traveling method, thus preventing its existence, thus splattering themselves across the temporal boundary of nonexistence and dissipating into a fine mist that was never there. If you kill your grandfather when he’s a boy, then you never exist, and therefore the possibility of you killing your grandfather never exists (the normal paradox there continues with “but then your grandfather exists so you exist so you can still go back and kill him blah blah,” all of which is unimportant because it’s not dealing with the actual method of traveling back). The universe continues on its way sans one temporal wanderer.

Think of Point Zero as a lighthouse that’s also a wall—the window of events you can potentially travel back to grows wider and wider as time marches on, but you can’t go past that wall; you simply don’t exist once you get past it. Events may constantly change and fluctuate as travelers slip back and forth, but the existence of the method is the only solid constant in a sea of chaos.

So this is great news, right? All we have to do is actually invent a way to time-travel, and we can fix all our mistakes from that point forward. We’ll create a utopia, keep going back again and again to ensure the most desirable outcome until it’s all sugarplums and gumdrop fairies, blissful perfection. Anytime something bad happens, we’ll just rewind a little bit, reload that last save, and make it so it never occurred.

Not so fast.

You see, whenever someone travels back, he completely wipes out whatever happened in the universe from the point he traveled back all the way to the point he arrived at. Butterfly effect, chaos theory, fractal branching—a tiny change introduced into a complex equation (and what could possibly be more complex to us than the universe?) alters the outcome in a million billion tiny unforeseen ways, ripples propagating across an infinitely vast pond, and the more time that passes, the larger the divergence. A traveler from Imperialist Singapore looking to slightly alter the path of genetic research brings about the rise of the Fifth Sudanese Reich, crushing the nascent island empire before it can encompass the world; a Free Anarchy Moscow agent slips back to alter the marriage ceremony of the duke of America for tax-break purposes and plunges half the planet into nuclear winter that a Mutant Jesus Reborn cleric then prevents from ever happening; competing travelers all racing back earlier and earlier in order to wipe the others from existence by preventing them from ever being born; the one constant being the ability to travel back to when that first switch was flipped…