FRATERNITÉ

We can’t be afraid to gather, to come together for sports and entertainment and joy

In the Stade de France, they kept playing and didn’t evacuate. The German team slept in the stadium, and the French team stayed with them. That’s how you beat hatred: You embrace your neighbour, you watch sports with them. You do it together, and you keep doing it. That’s what wins.

What did it have to do with sports, really? There was a soccer match in Paris on Friday, of course, and a sad hateful young man whose life had been reduced to delivering death and pain to strangers showed up 15 minutes after the match began with explosives strapped to him, and was turned away by security. He blew his own body to pieces and killed one other, just one. Another man tried at another gate 15 minutes later, and killed only himself. A little mercy.

They finished the soccer match. France was playing Germany. France won. I can’t imagine anybody pretended it really mattered.

Sports was one of the targets of the terror in France, of the nihilistic strategy designed to horrify and terrify and enrage. Other emptied young men also hit restaurants, and of course the Bataclan theatre, where the most blood was spilled. They picked places where people gather together, where the communal tissue of a place exists. The soccer match was just one piece of it. The 80,000 people inside were scared, but safe and lucky.

Sports has been preparing for this kind of thing for years. Pro sports leagues now include metal detectors, bag searches and limits, and long lines to get through security. We’re getting used to the new ways, most places. At the Super Bowl in Arizona earlier this year, the great columnist Sam Mellinger of The Kansas City Star spoke to Glendale mayor Jerry Weiers, who complained about the league’s hosting requirements, from tax exemptions to free advertising to, yes, security. Weiers told Mellinger that he was appalled that the NFL would tell his constituents what sorts of “guns and grenades” they could bring to the game. That complaint probably doesn’t fly very far even in Arizona, today.

This is the world we live in. The Olympics has become a near-military operation, starting after Munich in 1972. There were more than 40,000 Russian security forces deployed to Sochi in 2014. In 2008, Beijing had over 100,000. Britain spent over $2 billion on security for London 2012, and used nearly as many troops as it had in Afghanistan.

And in Sochi, next to the Caucasus, they warned of black widow suicide bombers amid documented threats from Islamist terrorists, and the British government deemed a terrorist attack before or during the Games “very likely.” Beside the now-standard missiles on rooftops, the Russians used camera sensors that claimed to be able to detect and interpret tiny vibrations in the head and neck to measure tension, and therefore potential threats.

In Munich six murderous monsters with guns and grenades scaled a six and a half foot fence, and got into athlete rooms with stolen keys. That was innocence, and there’s no going back to that.

All these years later, even after the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, after the Boston Marathon, it’s easy to feel like most of sports is sealed off from the real world, because most of sports can be secured. It’s like how attacking the Olympics itself has always seemed like a sucker’s bet, because it’s the definition of a hard target, and the attacks in France confirm that. At the soccer stadium, the young empty man was stopped; the other young monsters weren’t. Besides, the Olympics are not a part of everyday life — they are an extraordinary gathering, but the odds that the Olympics will ever come to your city are minimal. A fear of an attack on the Olympics is not very transferable.

Sporting events, though, happen in major cities across the world with regularity, and they are symbols because sports is one of the few things that bring cities and nations together. The security surrounding them creates massive lines outside stadiums of all kinds, which are the definition of soft targets. Once you watch the French attacks happen, it becomes so easy to imagine it happening to you. They were lucky those hateful young men arrived late. It’s easy to be afraid, if you want.

Planes don’t stop flying because some crash, and society shouldn’t stop functioning because of this. You secure what can be reasonably secured, but if you are afraid to come together, afraid to go to a restaurant, afraid of a concert hall, afraid of waiting in line to watch soccer or hockey or basketball or baseball, afraid of the person standing next to you in line, afraid of the people who need help, then you have lost something.

In sports, there are small examples and big ones of the right way forward. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers responded to an anti-Muslim slur during a moment of silence this weekend by saying, “It’s that kind of prejudicial ideology that, I think, puts us in the position that we’re in today, as a world.” In le Stade de France, they kept playing and didn’t evacuate, and that was safer. The German team slept in the stadium, and the French team stayed with them.

And the Boston Marathon, a year after it was attacked and some fools thought its communal spirit might be destroyed, came back filled with spectators, with families, with runners, with joy. They did it again this year. That’s how you beat hatred, cruelty, nihilism, emptiness. You embrace your neighbour, you eat with them, you listen to music with them, you wait to watch sports with them, and you cheer and boo for things that don’t really matter, not really, but the act of witnessing them does. You do it together, and you keep doing it. That’s what wins.