Placeholder Image

字幕列表 影片播放

  • Good morning, Hank! It's Tuesday!

  • Hank, you've just been greeted by the Project for Awesome donors who joined me this weekend to watch AFC Wimbledon's 2-1 victory over

  • Oxford United, a critical win because in order for

  • everyone's favorite third-tier English soccer team not to become a fourth-tier English soccer team, they need to finish in

  • 20th or above. And that win took AFC Wimbledon up to the dizzying heights of 18th.

  • But anyway my 27 hours in England reminded me of something weird about contemporary US life, which is that we're going through

  • challenges that lots of Americans don't even know

  • exist, right? Like people get their news from such wildly divergent sources that we don't even hear the same

  • stories, let alone agree on what they mean. And so even if something

  • terrible happened, say back in October, many people won't have heard about it,

  • which means that some of you are about to learn for the very first time that the US

  • men's national team did not qualify for the World Cup. I know right? How is this even possible?

  • I mean the United States is the richest nation on earth and FIFA is famously bribable

  • What went wrong? Basically we lost to Costa Rica twice and Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago.

  • But you know the old saying, when God closes a door how do you lose to Trinidad and Tobago?

  • I think that's the old saying.

  • Okay, but look, the United States was not the only country to fail to qualify for the World Cup

  • Italy won't be there nor will the Netherlands or Chile or

  • Canada or China or New Zealand or lots of other countries and for all of us in those countries we have a problem, or

  • possibly an opportunity

  • Who do we root for?

  • And also is there any way we can sell our support- for charity of course- or possibly for our own enrichment-- no for charity.

  • That's better. People of the

  • 179 nations that did not

  • qualify for the World Cup, we need to band together as one bad-at-football world and find one or possibly a

  • few countries to root for. And I'm talking about going all-in.

  • Jerseys, face paint, learning some chants, weeping for joy and then sorrow and then joy

  • and then finally sorrow. The obvious strategy would just be to auction off our love --some nerdfighters

  • And I did this back in 2014 and raised over $10,000 for sarcoma research--

  • And that might still be the best way to go about it

  • But the big down side

  • was that of course the rich countries ended up donating the most which kind of took some of the fun out of it.

  • So if you have any ideas on how to raise money while deciding who to root for please leave them in comments,

  • and if you don't have any ideas, please read the comments and vote for your favorite ideas.

  • You know who made it to the World Cup by the way? Iceland, which has a population smaller than that of Wichita,

  • Kansas. Also Costa Rica, which just passed the US in life expectancy and also obviously in soccer ability.

  • But I'm on a tangent. The important thing here is that those of us without a rooting interest in the World Cup need to find

  • one because otherwise we will be forced to gaze into the yawning abyss of meaninglessness.

  • I'm not totally kidding about that by the way. Like I know a lot of you will say that you don't care about soccer and

  • that it's just people trying to get a spherical object into a net without using their hands

  • which is like the stupidest human activity imaginable.

  • And I get that, but the central mistake of your reasoning is that football is not actually about feet or balls.

  • It's about community. Football matters because we share it and we need to find big endeavors to share across geographic and cultural

  • divides because they remind us that we are truly all in this together.

  • Of course sport isn't the only way to achieve that feeling but I think achieving it in sport does help us feel it elsewhere.

  • So I'm not kidding. I want to find a team to root for in the World Cup.

  • We need to care about stuff. Caring is so underrated! As Pope John Paul the second put it, "of all the unimportant things,

  • football is the most important." Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

Good morning, Hank! It's Tuesday!

字幕與單字

單字即點即查 點擊單字可以查詢單字解釋

A2 初級

我們應該支持誰? (Who Should We Root For?)

  • 2 0
    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
影片單字