An Incident The Other Day

So, since I am in a blogging mood, I will tell of a few recent occurrences and some observations from my life. Now I may not be the most eloquent or impressive blogger, but I will try to do my best.

For a while now, a group of my friends and I have played some sand volleyball on courts that we all live near at some Intel facilities. Don't know what it being on Intel has to do with anything, but there you go. On Saturday mornings and on days when there is no school, my friend Dimuth calls me up or texts me and says, "You up for a game today?" Now, I make it whenever I can and there are a few people who regularly come and some who are just random.

There we were. Six high school students. There are two from Sri Lanka, one from China, one from India and me, a white kid. Now, we were all getting along well. My team was starting to pull ahead in a game to 25. I guess I should tell you all that I played volleyball for a few years, am about six foot three and am pretty athletic. I was, probably, the best player there. We attempted to split up the teams fairly, but as I previously stated, mine was pulling ahead.

This is also the same time that things starting going for the worst. One of the people who played there a few times is rather competitive. I know that and understand that. For some reason I cannot recall his name, but I was never good with those anyways. However, that day was probably not his proudest moment in life. One of the players on his team, Frank, is not as athletically inclined, hand-eye coordinated or competitive. As the competitive person began to lose, he vented his anger on Frank.

Now at first, it seemed rather light-hearted and funny. Everyone laughed a little, including Frank. But the good-natured humor soon turned to rants and ravings about how inadequate Frank was at sand volleyball. It started bugging me. It eventually escalated to cussing, racial slurs, sand throwing and ball throwing. All directed at Frank. Suffice it to say, everyone else on the court was more than a little perturbed at his antics.

As I stated earlier that this was probably not the competitive person's proudest moment, I must admit that it was probably not mine either. For it took someone else speaking up to end the shenanigans. Ben decided that he had had enough. That there should not be any volleyball at all, if we could not get along. And so ended our volleyball for the day. A few of us still hung out, but we would have played for a while longer if not curtailed so abruptly.

In my previous blog, I spoke of learning from one’s mistakes. This is one mistake I hope I can learn from. I must speak up for my friends and make sure that such rude and outrageous behavior is not allowed. I was ashamed that, although not appreciative of what was being said, I stood around doing nothing. That was definitely not progressive.

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