One Comedian’s Arguments Against What We Were Taught to Believe.

“There is no ‘I’ in team.” — Anonymous (but probably some sports asshole)

My earliest sports-related memory is from when I was five or six years old and I joined my school’s intramural soccer team. My second sports-related memory is that I was terrible at soccer. My third sports-related memory is of the elation I felt when I quit soccer. No more after-school practices, watching the sunlight and my precious out-of-school hours slowly fade away. No more numb toes and fingers from the wickedly damp Pennsylvania wind. And best of all, no more teammates. I could fly solo now and do my own thing. Their goals — literal or figurative — no longer mattered.

Thus came my first unconscious realization that I didn’t give a fuck about a team or a team mentality. The whole “join the soccer team” rap was presented to us kids under the guise of innocent fun. But I remember almost immediately sensing a rat. It didn’t sit right with me when the jerk-off coach would say, “Let’s go out there and win! As a team!” Even as a kid, I got the feeling that meant, “The eleven best of you will play! And the rest of you that suck — be team players and go sit on the bench!” It also became quickly and painfully apparent that when a skilled player said, “Go team!” he was really just saying, “Go me!” So why would I have assisted any of these people in achieving their greater interests when they didn’t give a shit about my immediate ones? They were after ribbons and trophies. I just wanted to have some innocent fun.

So there was the rub. Big deal, right? Some kids played soccer, I got to play Nintendo instead. I’m not complaining. But as each year passed, it seemed another team would appear, rearing its shifty head while claiming to have the best of intentions. First came Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts. High school brought student council and varsity sports and extracurricular clubs. In college the social groups and student associations stumped around campus. And finally, in adulthood, the big dogs showed up: political parties, professional organizations, religious congregations, and AA.

Believe me when I tell you, I’ve dipped my toe into just about every one of those cesspools, always finding the same results: The team loves you to play for them, so long as you help produce for them, and you can only do that by winning or sitting on the bench. The Republicans and Democrats don’t want visionaries, they want suitable candidates. Business doesn’t want innovators, it wants company men. The priesthood doesn’t want bright kids on the straight and narrow, they want straight kids whose brains are narrow.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one circumstance where literal teamwork is truly worthwhile: survival in extreme conditions. If your plane crashes and you’re suddenly living in a remote forest with (as far as you know) the twelve remaining people on Earth, fine, stick together. Hunt, gather, reproduce for the good of the clan. But once you graduate to any sort of organized society, that group shit needs to go out the window. Doesn’t it seem that in a sophisticated culture, every time clumps of people get together to pursue one common goal, regardless of intention, things get ugly? Occupy Wall Street was a good idea, backed by a great intention, unless you were one of the lower Manhattan shop owners who couldn’t open for business due to the leagues of bongo players blocking your storefront door. And if you mentioned that fact to an Occupier — which I did, many times — they always had the same response: “We need to think about the greater interest.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? Seems to me every time the “big picture” starts being mentioned, the little people start getting fucked. I don’t care how righteous the cause is, blood of some kind will be spilled.

We seem to think that we’ve somehow progressed beyond the point of making boneheaded blunders on behalf of a team. Well, that’s what every “civilized” culture prior to us thought, too. And they fucked up. Royally. Look at the Salem witch trials. They didn’t take place that long ago — just over 300 years. Dial the clock back to a time when people had already concocted the telescope, a human-powered submarine, and an early method for blood transfusion, and you can find a group — of supposedly educated men no less — whose singular goal was to boil, burn, and drown women. And these people scoffed at, or murdered, anyone who questioned their motives. And here we are in 2017, full of confidence that we’ve transcended the idiocy of witch-hunters with our forward-thinking, progressive pursuits, all while ignoring the fact that there exists the KKK, NAMBLA, and people who still believe in witches.

So as Mr. Pink famously said in Reservoir Dogs, “Fuck sides! What we need here is a little solidarity.” I say, “Fuck teams! What need is a few more ‘I’s!”

It’s not about the right versus the left. It’s not about the spiritual versus the secular. It’s not about Wall Street versus Main Street. It’s about us versus them. Who am I, who are you, and are we fighting the same fight? There are cops that help the community and cops that bust heads for fun. There are lawyers that fight for civil rights and ambulance-chasing pieces of shit that carry neck braces in their briefcases. There are reporters that should be allowed to defiantly speak out in the White House press room and bloggers whose online rants should have them in Guantanamo Bay. Looking at any one of these groups through an all-or-nothing lens is just stupid. Stupid as a witch trial. Stupid as me trying to play soccer.

And by the way, when all hell finally does break loose — and it will — and angry mobs are patrolling your neighborhood, torches blazing and pitchforks swinging, who do you think is going have your back then? It won’t be a party you registered with, I can guarantee you that. It’ll be your neighbors. Not the institutions or committees or clubs. Your neighbors will be the ones that will help you…that is if you didn’t piss them off at some dinner party by claiming you were in the morally correct group and they, in fact, were not. The only thing more alienating than an asinine statement about your own team’s value is an asinine joke about your own team perspective. For instance: “There’s no ‘I’ in team but there sure is an M and an E!” I don’t know who first cracked that dumb fucking zinger, but, again, it was probably some sports asshole.

Photo: Shutterstock.com / VectorFusionArt