Friday, September 30, 2011

One day in September (or October, this year)

Before I start ranting about that which I wish to rant about, for the sake of the non-Australian people who read this blog, here is a quick summary of Australian Rules Football:

So there’s a ball, right?

And a bunch of muscle-y men who look amazing in little shorty shorts.
And a big, grassy oval.There are four posts at each end of that oval. If you kick the ball between the two big posts, you get six points. If you kick it between a big one and a little one, you get one point. If you miss the posts completely, you can’t kick for shite and you should go home immediately.

It is socially acceptable to support any of the following teams:
Essendon
Whoever is playing Collingwood.

And this last point brings me to my rant. Today was not the best day to be in Melbourne. The Grand Final parade was on, and the world’s most liveable city (for reals, we won that) was filled with a rare subspecies of human. I was at work and one of my customers mentioned there were a lot of people in the city today, to which I almost replied, ‘They’re not people, they’re Collingwood supporters.' Yeah. That's right. I’m racist against Collingwood supporters.

In my mind, this is who they are:
Then I look around and see that in reality, that is indeed 100% who they are. Is it ok to make generalisations about people if your generalisations are correct? Am I a bad person? Is it ok to be a football team racist?

I’d feel bad about the chance of a Collingwood supporter reading this, but we all know they can’t read.

2 comments:

Miche said...

Best blog post yet. And I hate football, not hate it really; I just don't get it. Now I do. Thanks for the education.

Lauren Brown said...

Thank you! I try to be edu-ma-cational. So yes, it's mostly about men in shorts.