Sports, horsemanship and the stage’

Sport is either private, like praying performed by a person alone in the privacy of a closed room, or public practiced collectively in fields and arenas, like praying collectively in places of worship. Public sport is what interests all people. They practice these sports and do not let others practice it in their stead, since this is as inconceivable as having a crowd enter a place of worship to watch one or more worshippers praying, without praying themselves! It is also inconceivable for crowds to enter athletic fields and stadiums to watch one or more players, without practicing the games themselves.

Sports are like praying, eating, and like the comfort of warmth and coolness. It would be foolish for a crowd to enter a restaurant to watch one or more persons eating, or to let one or more persons enjoy warming their bodies in their place. It is unacceptable for a society to permit an individual or a team to monopolize sports to the exclusion of other members of society. Neither is it acceptable for society to bear the expenses of such a monopoly by one individual or team. This is as an unacceptable as having a people democratically allowing an individual, or a group – whether a party, a social class, a sect, a tribe or an assembly – to determine their destiny on their behalf or determine their needs for them.

Privately practiced sport is of no interest to anyone except the person who exercises on his own and at his own expense. However public sports are a common need for people and no one person, or group of persons, can play a game of sports on behalf of the people, neither from the physical nor from the ,democratic point of view. Physically speaking, this representative player cannot transmit to others, what physical benefits he gained from the exercise; and democratically speaking, no individual or team has the right to monopolize sports, power, wealth or weapons, to the exclusion of others.

Sporting clubs which constitute the traditional sports institutions in the world today and are maintained by public funds and other public means of support in every country, are rapacious social instruments, not unlike the dictatorial political instruments which monopolize power to the exclusion of the people, and the economic instruments which monopolize society’s wealth, as well as the traditional military instruments which monopolize weapons, acting as substitutes for society.

. The era of the masses that destroys the monopolizing instruments of wealth, power an  weapons, shall inevitably destroy the instruments that monopolize social activities such as sports and horsemanship. The masses line up to support a candidate to act as their representative in determining their destiny on the impossible assumption that this candidate shall represent them and uphold their dignity and sovereignty and all related considerations, and are eventually alienated, as they watch a person doing what they should naturally be doing themselves. These same masses are like the crowds that do not play sports themselves, due to their inability to do so because of their ignorance and because they are scorned by the monopolizing instruments that are bent on distracting these numbed crowds that laugh and applaud instead of practicing the sport monopolized by these rapacious instruments.

Sport, like power, should be for the masses, and just as wealth and weapons should be for the people, sport as a social activity should also be for the people.

Public sport is for all the people. It is the right of all because in addition to entertainment, it is beneficial to health. It is unreasonable to let sport be monopolized, by particular groups who obtain its moral and health benefits to the exclusion of others, while the masses’ public sport all the needed facilities and means of support, and pay the expenses to maintain it. The multitude which crowds the stadium to watch a game, laugh and applaud, is a multitude of fools who are incapable of practicing sports themselves; they crowd the grandstands practicing lethargy and applaud those heroes who took the initiative, and who dominated the field and the sporting activities, and exploited all the offered means of supports sustained by the masses. The grandstands of public athletic fields are actually constructed to obstruct access to the fields. These grandstands shall one day be vacated and abolished when the masses march into athletic fields to practice sports in crowds, as they realize that sports are activities to be practiced not watched.

The grandstands shall disappear when no spectators come to fill up the rows and seats. People who are incapable of performing heroic acts in life, and those who are not well read in history and are incapable of visualizing the future, and those who do not take life seriously, are the marginal people who fill up the seats in theatres and other kinds of performances, to watch.life events and learn how these events take their course. They are exactly like pupils who fill up the seats in schools because they ar6 uneducated, because they are initially illiterate.

Those who make their own life do not need to see how life takes its course through watching the actors on stage or other theatres. Likewise, horsemen who ride their horses have no place on the sidelines of the racetrack, and if all people owned horses there would be no spectators to watch and applaud. The seated spectators are only those who cannot practice horse riding because they do not ride horses.

Thus Bedouin people are not interested in the theatre and other performances because they are hard working and take life very seriously. They are the makers of the serious life and that is why they look upon acting with scorn. Bedouin people also don’t watch players playing a game; they practice their own games collectively and hold their own festivities, because they feel the spontaneous, inexplicable need for it.

The various kinds of boxing and wrestling are evidence that mankind has not yet purged the tendency to cruel behaviour. But this shall inevitably come to an end when man progresses and becomes more civilized. Gun matches and before that, human offerings were familiar practices in an earlier stage ‘)f human progress. But these cruel practices endedlundreds of years ago, and later, man came to look upon those practices with self-derision and distress too because human beings like himself had once indulged in such practices. It shall be the same with the various kinds of boxing and wrestling after decades or maybe hundreds of years. But the more civilized and the more progressive individuals are the only ones able to avoid such cruel practices and refrain from giving encouragement to

those who indulge in them