THINK ABOUT INCLUDING THEM, BEFORE YOU DECREASE THEM.

Ebenezer Scrooge advocated early in A Christmas Carol by Mr. Charles Dickens, that some people should just die and decrease the surplus population.? That was before he met Tiny Tim.? Scrooge asked the Ghost of Christmas Present if Tim would live.? The Ghost indicated Tim would not necessarily live, repeated Scrooge's own words back to him, and said something like "So before you go talking about decreasing the surplus population, you had better be sure whether you stand higher in the eyes of God than this poor man's child."

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????????? I want to explore the idea of being inclusive rather than exclusive in our everyday dealings with other people, and taking a look at some of the unintended consequences, with an example from my own life.

????????? My example comes from high school football.? I attended a high school whose football team was open to all.? For six years including both Junior Varsity and Varsity, I played football.? I was not the most talented of football players.? I was not and am not even close to being a superior athlete.? More accurately, I went to football practice for six years.

????????? Until my Senior Year in high school football, I sat the bench.? Years of being second string for game days, and years of hitting and being hit during practices that did not end until after dark.

????????? But I learned a lot by watching the people who could play the game.? I watched the starters, the first string.? I also learned courage, although my clearest memory of experiencing courage comes from the locker room and not the football field.

????????? One day, I realized that I left something by the bench and went back to the football field after a game.? When I came back to the locker room, the door was locked.? I banged loudly until someone came and opened it.? The person that opened it was one of our star players, a transfer from another school district who was related to one of the coaches but did not have much else going for him, so far as I could see.

????????? He opened the door.? I walked past him and said, "Thanks."? He kicked me from behind.? There were other players who saw this, but no coaches were around.? I was on my own.

????????? So I turned back to him and said, "Oh, big man.? If you beat me up now, big deal.? What does that prove?? You can beat the daylights (I said a different word) out of me, everyone knows that but if you do, you haven't proved anything.? And if you do, everyone will know because I won't hide it, I'll be the one to tell everyone."

????????? At that point, a friend of his took him by the shoulders and nudged him away saying that it would not be good for him to beat me up.

????????? I learned about courage that day.? I do not know where the impulse came from.? I just turned around and faced him.? It felt as if I was watching somebody else do this.? To my astonishment, I learned about courage by displaying it myself.

????????? I also learned enough about football from basically being second string all through high school, that years later I could stand on the practice field as a Quarterback for the Fightin' Irish of Notre Dame in 1972.? Of course, I was a writer for the school magazine, but supposedly as far as the team knew, I was just another person who walked on to the team.? I knew enough about football (or so I imagined) to be able to practice with the Notre Dame football team, which I did for six months.?

????????? We did exercises under the Notre Dame Football Stadium on earth floors in the tunnels underneath the stands in the House That Rockne Built.? It was the same place then as when Knute Rockne transformed Notre Dame football and made it possible for the Stadium to be built. ??It has since been rebuilt, which for many reasons is a shame.

????????? I learned what I thought was the meaning of "from pillar to post" doing drills under those stands in that Stadium on the dirt floors.? We would move like crabs on all fours as fast as we could, literally from pillar to post.? (If this is not where the phrase comes from, please don't tell me.? I want to stay comfortable in believing this to be possible, having thought it might be so for over 50 years now.)

????????? We ran up the stands to the top of the Stadium in another drill, then across to the next walkway, and then down, and then across, and then up again, and so on.? Sometimes the real players moved so fast that I felt compelled to move to the side and let them pass, as if I were a slow-moving car on the road and they were driving sports cars.

????????? My helmet had inscribed in it the name of a star Quarterback who had graduated the year before, so I was ready to go.? Until Coach Ara Parseghian ordered me off the field.? As Ara put it, "I saw you out here yesterday, and you might get hurt.? That would not be good for the University of Notre Dame."

????????? Pause.

????????? "Of course, that wouldn't be good for you, either," he said.

????????? When I put my helmet away for the last time, it had just begun to fit.

????????? None of that would have happened if my high school football team had not been open to all comers, including people with relatively little talent, like me.? The lesson I take away from this experience is that whenever we want to be exclusive, and keep people out for whatever reason, we should be careful to consider who it is that we are keeping out, and who we are letting in.

P.S. If you want to check out the article I wrote about my Notre Dame Football experience, "So You Want To Be a Quarterback?," it was the lead article in a Special Issue devoted to Notre Dame Football in 114 Scholastic 6 (Jan. 26, 1973).? For copyright purposes, I will not republish it but you can find it online in the Scholastic Magazine archives at https://archives.nd.edu/football/Football-1972s.pdf.

P.P.S. As I write this post, it is the Anniversary of Richard Nixon's Resignation as President of the United States.? Timely, don't you agree?

This article is also available as a Substack newsletter article, https://open.substack.com/pub/dennisjwall/p/think-about-including-them-before?r=dxcx1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.

?2024 Dennis J. Wall.? All rights reserved.