Our First Hockey Game

"Punch him!  Punch him!  The fights are the best part!"

We went to our first hockey game recently, with the tickets the kiddos won at Bingo Night in December.  And it was certainly entertaining.

The game was good, too.

The 10-year-old behind us liked fighting.  He liked it more than the game.  And rooted for it constantly.  More than he paid attention to the game.

His parents thought he was so cute.  "Oh," his mom tittered, "we should have taken him to boxing!"

"That's right, son," said dad proudly.

Thankfully, my kids didn't hear him at all.  They did notice the fighting, helmets and fists flying, especially because it made the highlights reel all three times.  They were upset by it. Confused, they asked why we didn't stand and clap like those around us.  "I can't clap for violence," I said, having just purchased a fundraising green and white "Angels of Newtown" bracelet.

It seems naive, but I have been so much more aware recently of how violence is very ingrained in the American psyche and culture and has been for hundreds of years:  the slaughter of Native Americans by colonists and later by cowboys; the Salem witch trials and various colonial tortures; tar and feather, burning in effigy, lynching; "meet me at the backstop after school;" the love of boxing and wild west shoot-outs and yes, hockey fights; the preponderance of guns; wars and weapons of mass destruction; our preference for punitive prison sentences and the death penalty; our pop culture obsession with violent epsiodes and people--Charles Manson comes to mind first--even the "true crime" section of the bookstore; the love of violent video games and horror movies; domestic abuse; gang warfare; the Steubenville rape; school shootings and mass murderers; "Law and Order," "CSI," "The Sopranos," "Dexter," in addition to the rarity of pacifists like conscientious objectors, Quakers, the Amish.  I'm sure there's more I could list.   We might like Mom, apple pie, and baseball, but you have to add violence.  And in that, we are different from most industrialized nations.  It's not that they don't have guns and we do, it's that we want our guns desperately and they don't as much.  And that speaks to something in our culture that all the post-Newtown commentary and Steubenville coverage that I've read hasn't really pinpointed.

But I could clap for almost everything else--the elementary-school students singing the national anthem, the fuzzy blue mascot waving the team flag, the "peanuts" playing hockey in the period breaks, the pop musical breaks between play, the way Bud danced and cheered, the return of the team after the breaks, the kids playing the karaoke game, the soldier in uniform who won a free dinner, to win a t-shirt in the t-shirt toss, and the shots on goal and the goals our team scored.  And when we won.

Sometimes I had a hard time following the game--it's like soccer at the speed of basketball with something smaller than a tennis ball.  It looked messy.  Which could have been me or them.  But the speed more than made up for my lack of knowledge in creating excitement.

I didn't cheer for one of my favorite parts, though:  the delicious garlic fries, cheese fries, and hot churros.

And I didn't cheer like the boy behind us.

But I would go back to another hockey game.