Thursday, May 16, 2013

 If You Go Around Making Enemies, You are Going to have Enemies

  There is IRS Gate, getting all the attention, and Golden Gloves Gate, getting hardly a pingle. 
   Golden Gloves Gate is not a scandal, on par with IRS Gate, but it might well be the bigger tragedy. To learn about Golden Gloves Gate, we need to turn back the pages of time to 2010, when the debate over immigration was about as hot as it was ever to get.
   And, it was in 2010 that Golden Gloves changed its rules. No longer would it accept participants who had legal residency. No, that would not be enough. Now, they would need to be full citizens.
   Wonder then, if you will, how news of the change was greeted by Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Yes, how was it greeted by the man who, with his brother, would go on to infamy for the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan, the boxer, how did he take it? He had fought in the Golden Gloves in Salt Lake City just the year before. He was an accomplished fighter, having won a title in New England. And, he aspired to more.
   But, he wasn't an American, at least not in terms of being a full citizen.
   It seems only natural that the decision stung him, that he felt rejected, that we, as a society, made him feel unwanted. 
   Now, if you go around making enemies, you are going to have enemies. We, as a society, were certainly not making friends with Tamerlan.
   There is no justification for what Tamerlan and his brother did. None. It was terrible and heinous. Nor do we know that Tamerlan would not have gone the same route even if not rejected by Golden Gloves. But, we do know this: Rejecting people does tend to make enemies out of them, and making enemies can cause problems.
   So, while the rest of the country is more concerned with IRS Gate, I can't help but wonder if the bigger tragedy was that we didn't show a little love for Tamerlan. Rather than more or less telling him he wasn't good enough for us and wasn't good enough to play with us, and we didn't want him in our tournament, why not just let him box? What harm would there have been in that? Why reject him? Why make him feel unwanted?
   Everyone has a seed of greatness in them, and I use the term "greatness" to mean they can accomplish notable though terrible things, as well as wonderful and nice things. All of us are sleeping giants, in a way. Don't wake a sleeping giant? We might never know if that is what we did.
   Yes, there is no harm in treating people right. But, there can be much harm in treating them wrong. If you go around making enemies, you are going to have enemies. And, sooner or later, it is going to come back to bite you. Was Tamerlan an example of this?

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