I love soccer and the Brazilian team (second only to the Portugal's) but I would love more for people to have food, hospitals and schools.
The Ministry of Education reports that over a third of education budget goes to school meals, because most of the students in public schools either eat at school or not at all. According to South magazine (a business magazine that reports on the Third World), Brazil has a higher infant mortality rather than Sri Lanka. A third of the population lives below the poverty line and "seven million abandoned children beg, steal and sniff glue on the streets. For scores of millions, home is a shack in a slum, or increasingly, a patch of ground under a bridge."
Welcome to the 21st century where sport achievements qualify as legitimate grounds to decimate the poor. This picture is an inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time: admiring the great soccer goals as hundreds of thousands of starved, scavenge for food in garbage dumps.
I have nothing against sports. Alhamdulillah I trained myself to pray Fajr on time because I used to wake up early in the morning to watch 2006 FIFA finals. I love throwing a spiral. At the same time I think it is important to recognize that the mass hysteria about spectator sports plays a significant role in the way we function in society. First of all, spectator sports make people more passive, because you are not doing anything - you are just watching someone else do something. Secondly, spectator sports engender jingoist and chauvinist attitudes, sometimes to quiet an extreme degree. Some sports teams like India and Pakistan cricket teams are so antagonistic and passionately committed to winning at all costs that they abandon the standard handshake before or after the game. These countries can't even do civil things like greeting one another because they are ready to one each other on the field. Their fans react the same way. It's spectator sports that engender those attitudes, particularly when they're designed to organize a community to be hysterically committed to their gladiators. That's very dangerous and it has lots of deleterious effects.
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