This is a good day for catching up on laundry, doing the weekly grocery shop, and filling the cars up with gas. Just a nice productive Monday, no different than any other.
You know how there are things that you learn when you’re a kid, but REALLY LEARN as an adult? Like, I learned to wash my hands when I was a child, but I didn’t REALLY LEARN to wash them until I was an adult and it mattered to me to get the germs off. I learned to brush and floss my teeth when I was a child, but I didn’t REALLY LEARN to brush/floss them until I was 22 years old and making $5.80/hour and had four giant cavities I had to pay to fill. I learned to do just-in-case shopping before a storm when I DIDN’T do so and then was snowed in with the resulting toddler.
There is also a batch of things I learned when I had to teach them to the kids, and one of those things is the embarrassingly dorky concept of good sportsmanship. I didn’t play sports much as a child (other than a brief bench-sitting time on the Little Christian School soccer team, for which I had to wear below-the-knee culottes so I wouldn’t be too provocative in my soccer uniform), and I don’t remember the concept coming up much otherwise. Teaching it to the kids, combined with seeing vivid negative examples from adults who haven’t yet learned/incorporated it, has been very instructive.
Now possibly you played a lot of sports as a child or figured this all out long ago and so this is like Being a Human Being 101 for you, but for me it was kind of mind-blowing to realize that good sportsmanship is for the WINNER as well as for the LOSER. And in fact, in some sense it is MORE for the winner. The loser must be polite and must accept the outcome graciously: no public tantrums, no “IT’S NOT FAIR!!,” no violently overturning the game board all over the floor. But the winner has an even greater burden, because the winner is the HAPPY one in this situation. The winner must be polite too, and must accept the outcome graciously: no public gloating, no mocking, no butt-waggling. AND ALSO the winner must be especially gracious in the face of any slippage in sportsmanship from the loser, because the loser is the one who is suffering and the winner is the one who is feeling GREAT. Overcoming the feelings that go along with defeat is hard, it’s really HARD, and overcoming the feelings that go along with victory is…not all that hard, because the winner is happy instead of miserable. The winners know this down to their elemental beings because the winners have all been losers at one time or another, and so have had a chance to compare attitudes.
It’s so common and human to attempt to be a good sport and to FAIL, or to forget to try, or to be too upset and unhappy to try immediately, or to stumble a bit before finding solid footing. Even someone who is trying hard to be a gracious loser may need a little time to adjust. Even someone who is trying to accept defeat may need to go through a few other stages first in order to get to that acceptance. And during that time, it is not helpful to have the winners waggling their butts and saying “WE are the WINners and YOU are the LOSErs, WE are the WINners and YOU are the LOSErs, how does it feel to LOSE, LOSERS??? YOU DESERVED IT!! LOSERS!!”
The winners of COURSE may celebrate their win, but it would be considerate of them to keep in mind the people who are feeling super sucky at that moment. It isn’t as if the winners must shut themselves in their bedrooms and scream “YAYYYYYY!!!” into their pillows to muffle their joy, but it is good sportsmanship to avoid crossing the line between rejoicing and gloating. Are you waggling your butt, either physically or symbolically? Then you are gloating.
In the case of a political election, it’s useful for both winners and losers to think to themselves, “How would I be feeling right now if my candidate had lost/won instead of won/lost, and how would I want the other side to be behaving about it?” Winners may feel as if they’re just rejoicing, until they imagine their uncles who belong to the other party behaving the same way and realize it would seem like grossly unsportsmanlike nyah-nyah-the-best-candidate-won gloating. Losers may not realize their expressions of disappointment have crossed over into unsportsmanlike behavior, until they imagine the other political party making similar remarks in the face of a loss.
Again: it is the winners, I think, who have the greater responsibility to keep the situation civil and pleasant. Both sides will stumble in their quest for good sportsmanship following an event, but the stumbles of the losers should elicit more feelings of mercy, and be more politely overlooked as temporary and understandable lapses in the face of great disappointment. The winners and losers will BOTH have to bite their tongues hard to deal with the stumbles of the other side, but the winners can distract themselves with a reverie about the happiness of the recent win, while the losers have no such comfort.