The fault is just ours.

I was thinking  why football is so important in our life . Why if we win a match we are the best in the world, but if we lose a cup final we are the worst. Why the club manages humor at work and the  National Team  manages humor in the country, that if they lose, we feel guilt.

When did we begin to delegate our happiness to a handful of young people no more than 25? When did football cease to be a sport, or a show (or a big business, as Carlos Salvador Bilardo said 30 years ago), to be the engine of our lives? Raised like that, it sounds like it's not true; we don't do that. But that's how we are.  It is not difficult for a passion to seize a passionate people. That  passion  to the extreme be won over an extremist people.  

I think it was back in the '40s, when we stopped being a great country and started declining. When they started giving us bread and circus and we grabbed him, instead of protesting. When we got our heads into the earth,  not to see how we were going to crap ourselves as a country  , and there, our immigrant dreams. We stayed with the only thing that gave us a joy. And as a team can't always win, we take joys and sorrows to the extreme.

I don't know how to fix it. I just know we're not going to change. Of course, unless we grow up and want to be a great country again, the best country in the world, no fault.

 Passion and football rivalries as a national identity 

River or Boca, Maradona or Messi, Unitarios or Federales; Argentines always manage to see rivalries in everything. And  what started as a  football  chicano ends up turning into a flag that dominates our life . And I'm not just talking about football.

Football is just one of the many ways in which our dichotomous identity takes shape. We take our passions to the last consequences.  We feed on fundamentalisms to defend our position ultra-detriment to any possible logical analysis.  

That's not healthy. Not in football, not in life. It's not good to get carried away by fanaticism because that clouds the perspective. We see things from one place and everything else is considered garbage. This underlying bipolarity denies the possibility of intermediate approaches and condemns us to an  extremist and polarized society.  It divides us little by little while we cannot find a point of consensus.  

And the more we polarize the further we get away from that intermediate point that could unite us. That's why I think it's important to get this football stigma out of rivalries. The extremes only serve to distance us and show us reality under a mantle of subjectivities.

 How to find the way to the center?  

It is difficult to find consensus when  our identity was always made up of polarizations . The first Argentine “rivalry” arose at the time of the revolution. We had to choose between being a colony or an independent nation. Then we met in the time of Rosas with the dichotomy between Unitarians and Federales. And so we went forward throughout history. Peronism-Antiperonism; Kirchnerism-Antikirchnerism and so  ad infinitum .

 How can we become moderate if we were always extreme?   I wish I had the answer, but I don't have it. I can only say that to find the way to the center we have to look for it. We must try to get the polarization band out of the polarization to see beyond what they show us. Look deep into our minds that critical and questioning spirit that competes us not to settle for anything. Not to accept ideas blindly just because we find it comfortable. Let's question, investigate, be critical and not defend a flag because we do.