Big boxing fight has come and gone but poverty will persist

IT WAS promoted to be the fight of the century. The Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor fight. Now it is history.

One of them won. Soon a new event will be broadcast to be really, without doubt, absolutely promised to be, the most significant fight, game, political victory, marriage, business money-making deal, or whatever, of the 21st. century.

But let us stick to the fight of the century. The hype, the money, the bookies, the gathering of friends and family with loads of liquor in front of a TV to see how two men hit each other to smithereens. Let me be the silly party popper. You have seen the blood, sweat and brain-bashing of two human beings that will nevertheless make millions of dollars by presenting us with something similar to the fights centuries ago between slaves and hungry lions, then not yet on TV, but mouth-watering people still filled the arenas to the brim. The same orgasmic enthusiasm applicable. Let me suggest something before we continue.

You have seen the lekka fight. Please go to YouTube and watch Vanessa James and Morgan Ciprès, with the Sound of Silence sung by the raw-voiced David Draiman as a leading beam to become ice-skating trophy holders.

Jip, I thought so. The matcho guys sneering and turning to the profound pages of this newspaper.

Where one can read about what Mayweather did to McGregor’s face. Or the bone-crushing tackles performed by other worshipped heroes on the rugby field.

For those bleak-souls who are still with me, a few thoughts.

Sigmund Freud wrote about these two concepts. Eros and Thanatos. The wish for life and the wish for death. He meant something much more profound, but hear my diluted use of these very important concepts. Life is a struggle for most people. They just wish to survive from day to day.

Some other lucky ones find themselves in middle-class structures where one can drive past begging men who will soon have to turn to crime in order to survive, begging women who will soon have nothing left to lose but their souls when they are forced into prostitution.

And some other people, the most lucky ones, who became superbly rich by hook or by crook or by hard work, shrewd manoeuvring or myopic interest in life, will think about their bulging bank accounts here and everywhere as they drive up to their mansions. As Peter O’Toole sighed, spat out, in despair in the movie Man of La Mancha, “Life, not as it is, but how it should be!”.

Ah, I can hear it. Some balanced church members agitated about this short-sighted portraying of how we live and rather turning to the social page of this morning paper. An acid-question to you personally. Have you ever driven past begging men, some dragging small children along to win sympathy, past young girls begging?

And if such a fully planned and functioning care unit as the soul of the spiritual community is still lacking because there are just too many more important issues to attend to, have you then contacted the fully functional social welfare system of the government so that social workers can get to lost, hopeless people on the fringe of self-indulging society?

What will it be? Living this life as a precious and brief encounter, living in moderation and empathetic care so that suffering people can have a life too. Or to exist entwined in selfishness, greed, ignorance of the pleading, hopeless eyes of people on pavements and far away in overheating, then again in icebox shacks. Making hoopa! when two men keep beating each other to physically and psychologically break the soul of the other.

Freud used the concept differently, but is this way of living life not a form of selling the soul to the creeping darkness of death in its many conman facets? The creations of base gods?

Fighters, shopping centres, cute vehicles, religions based on home-grown perceptions, excluding the others as untruthful, perhaps to be pragmatically endured? No one admitting that for the arrived classes life is really all about cushiness and cosy home-fires.

Watch those two dancers again. Could that be a metaphor of advanced human life or will we rather continue yelping joy on the hitting power of boxers and all other practices looking structurally different but adhering to the same demolishing principles? Which one should be our leading compass to real valuable life? Life or the shallow pursuing and allowing of creeping death.

Sing it again Art and Paul, David and Emilìana. That song about the sounds of silence.