As Seen on TV: Your Dream Here
By Sarah Moon
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Our nation has elevated the Super Bowl’s importance to that of a holy day. For many, the precedence the Super Bowl takes in their lives places it far beyond the realm of “just for fun.” This game is serious business.
Let’s imagine a male fan in his forties, a husband and father. He’s gone through all the rituals – the favorite jersey, the favorite recliner all the way back, the Molson Ice, the bag of Tostitos and warm queso sitting beside him. If after the three hours of play – interrupted by commercials even more aggressive than the players on the field - this man’s team loses, he may switch off the TV in a quiet rage, wander off into his basement and refuse to speak to anyone in the family for the next two days.
Such a deeply personal, emotional response to such a distant and contrived event is downright ridiculous. This man’s life’s in the crapper because, to him, the failure of “his” team represents his own failure. Conversely, the success of his team would represent his own
success. Why? Because nothing in this man’s real life comes close to fulfilling the dreams that once possessed him in his youth.
Every person has had a dream. As a child, our football-lovin’ man may have told his teacher that he wanted to be an astronaut. Today, let’s say he’s a contractor. Why didn’t he become an astronaut? Come to mention it, why didn’t you become an astronaut?
Maybe you found out you weren’t good at math or it was suggested, of course subtly, that girls “don’t do that,” or your family moved to South Carolina and you got depressed and self-defeating and thought you’d do well to make enough to pay for an apartment, a car and protein shakes so you could develop enough muscle definition to get a chick to sleep with you. Maybe you started doing drugs. Maybe you didn’t get into Berkeley. But the point is, you had that dream. And it was a great dream. So it’s not that some people have big dreams and some people don’t.
It’s that some people don’t follow through on their big dreams.
But all the energy, hope and desire we used to channel into our once-outsized dreams doesn’t vanish. It goes somewhere. And often, simply out of laziness and the easy accessibility of T.V., it gets channeled into the dreams of our home sports teams or…our favorite Hollywood stars. When we admire them, dote on them, war-paint our faces or dress in their fashions, we are saying: “I take his/her/their dream for my own.”
But this vow is a vow to live a fantasy. We can’t have their dream. It’s their dream to have and to enjoy. Why? Because they did the work and had the luck. To whom should the Super Bowl really matter? It should matter to the men who have committed years of their lives, risking life-threatening injury and working their asses off in training. Who deserves the Oscar? The woman who sacrificed the stable life with the desk job and the respect of her family to struggle alone for ten years as a waitress in New York City.
Exchanging one’s personal dreams for the dreams of those in the media is dangerous on many levels. But the overall danger to society is that human potential languishes. No, we can’t all be “the fastest” or “the hottest”. But we can all be better than what we are. A man who spends 50% of his free time watching ESPN and engages 80% of his emotional life in football simply is not reaching his full potential. A woman who devotes 50% of her free time to reading US and Vanity Fair and 80% of her intelligence to analyzing the love lives in elite Hollywood is not reaching her full potential. Why do people spend so much of their energy on strangers? Because the desire for achievement is irrepressible in all of us and the experience of dreams by proxy feels better than no experience at all. But these preoccupations must be seen for what they are -- evidence of latent desires in the ones who harbor them.
How can you win your own Super Bowl or Oscar or presidential nomination? What would be the equivalent in your own life? Running a marathon? Giving a speech at a Green party rally? Running for local office? Forming a band? Whatever it is, start on the path toward achieving that thing and then perhaps if your team loses next year, your disappointment will start to vanish as soon as you click “off” on your remote control.
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Sarah Moon lives in Carroll Gardens with her roomate Nick and cat Jasper. She teaches writing at Baruch College and Fordham Univeristy where her students are always making up fabulous stories...to explain their absences. She received her MFA in playwriting from Brandeis University where her play Losing the Game was produced in the spring of 2004. Her poetry has been published in Rosebud Magazine.
© 2005 Me Three