The tickets for the team in white are not in demand; no scalpers walk the street outside the stadium. The pale team is scheduled to lose, and no one wants to pay a premium for the seats of the soon-to-be-defeated. No one ponies up the money for the tickets of the team in the brown jerseys, either.  A sure winner is as boring as a sure loser. The only bets being placed are placed by the politicians and businessmen who know without doubt they can turn a profit or a vote because the circumstances and outcome are sure.

In fact, everyone is very pointedly ignoring the fact that the game is not only scheduled, but underway as I write. It has been underway for a good long now, and will only end when no one remembers that there ever was a white team, or even that there was a game. Except, of course, those of us who realize that we have been handed a white jersey and shoved onto the playing field, or pushed into a front row seat to watch our team go down in flames.

One of the unstated rules of the game is that either team can add players at any time during the game, the only limitations being that they a) are born or b) recruited. The tactics involved can be quite direct, and sometimes grotesque.

One segment of the brown team births new players without consideration for family structure or the benefits of stability for the new players who happen to be children. The goal? Sheer numbers, and kids who have learned to yell loud and long to get what they want in a less-than-ideal environment. Another segment listens to their clergymen, who should know about these things, and births new players as God or Allah wills and the host country’s welfare system holds out.

In the interim, the team in the white uniforms has been listening to lectures on the overcrowding of the playing field, observing the increasing numbers of brown players, and deciding not to birth any more white players because the field is overcrowded already. Meanwhile, the playing field continues to fill up with members of the brown team. The white players can’t quite understand why they are forced into a smaller and smaller portion of the field. They decide to consult the experts.

Finding out that expert opinion (“The Optimum Population Trust” is one such “expert” group)  has called for members of the white team to have fewer children in order to combat global warming; the white team members edge further away from members of the opposite gender. They are also very, very careful not to fart, carbon dioxide being another source of global warming. This leads to their reputation for formality and dignity, but no progress in the game.

Meanwhile the brown team is pumping out players as quickly as they can as the time clock spins around, and stuffing themselves and their offspring with beans and tortillas, or hummus and pita bread. So much for global temperature levels!

Not that they care, of course.

They are winning.

The white team, with its single minded focus on following the rules and doing the right thing occupies a smaller and smaller portion of the playing field. Team members discuss putting a fence around their space and calling it a gated community, but decide that would promote exclusivity, which goes against their ideal of fairness.

And this is precisely the white team’s problem. They want to do the right thing. They enjoy following rules, because rules make things safe. They are willing to sacrifice for what they perceive as the good of the whole.

They are also blind as bats, and can’t see the evidence that they are losing even when it fills the stadium in front of them.

You might be wondering when the actual game play will be begin.

It already has.

This is it.

Front row seat for the genocide, anyone?

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