Anzac Day: Remember the fallen, remember the remaining

There are plenty of exaggerated narratives week-to-week in the AFL.

Those exaggerations and hot takes are the fun in sport. The fans’ attitudes of impending doom after a few losses early in the season, the joy oozing after a promising start. The vitriol left and right from journos, amateur pundits and all the sports fanatics in between. All things we should embrace for the childish joy that it is.

We need to take ourselves less seriously as fans, we need to see that our opinions and uneducated ‘masterstroke’ suggestions are just that.

I, for one, am guilty as charged on all counts of snap decisions, overthought or underthought opinions, as well as uneducated and misinformed coaching suggestions – but that should not discourage the fandom we engage in. It’s what makes sports fun for fans when the game isn’t actually on and maybe, just maybe, the opportunity to jag a solid take and see your predictions come to fruition.

If those things are the childish, then the competition proper is the compelling. It is the cauldron of human emotion that we feel vicariously through those champions that take the field. Men and women that pour their heart and soul into the pursuit of greatness.

This is the human connection of sport, the connection you feel to other humans, their raw emotion felt as yours as you see a man or woman filter a lifetime of blood sweat and tears into a single moment in time on a field. You can feel it through them, your heartbeat rises and falls in unison, as a collective of strangers lets out gasps of horror or cheers of elation. This can be put down to one of human nature’s most beautiful traits: empathy – the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes and bear some fraction of the weight they feel.

My favourite moment in all of sport is when the occasion is so great, has so much gravitas, it demands ultimate effort and desperation. You see men and women giving every single ounce of themselves. These momentous occasions have no greater exponent than Anzac Day.

Anzac Day today will have it in spades, and it always will. We get a healthy dose of perspective on this day. About real human emotion, About the dark corners that still exist in our world and in our minds, about the men and women who work in that dark corner of our world in an effort to bring our people further into the light.

Now I am not here to advocate for war and its use in progressing the human race. But I will say this. When evil comes knocking on our doorsteps they are all we have to answer. One day maybe it won’t be necessary to condition our young men and woman who put their hands up and sacrifice themselves into an unnatural state of being, a state of being in which they feel comfortable in the face of death and destruction but not when they come home and sit on their couch with their loved ones.

Listening to veterans talk about their sense of estrangement when they return home is absolutely tragic. It is absolutely necessary for those of us that enjoy the freedom those and their predecessors have provided to listen to their stories and, say thank you when we can.

I, today, will take that minute of silence and some, to think about those men and women who have gone to hell and have come back with a piece of it in them. It’s not about glorification of war or death, it’s about the contemplation of those that deal with that which we do not understand. The young soldiers who bear the weight of our races’ inability to understand and accept each other without resorting to violence in the face of our differences.

Now how does sport compare to any of this? Well, it doesn’t. But what it does do is give a platform for the lucky few players to rise, to give more than what they thought they could in the name of those brave forgotten heroes. To give us, the fans, the opportunity to collectively honour those men and women in such number and such unison that those we are honouring feel, that at home they still belong to us and we still belong to them.