Dodge ball child’s play next to junior high locker room violence

Barari is a fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental
biology student.

By Sony Barari

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of jabberwocky from child
psychologists about how dodge ball is detrimental to the healthy
emotional growth of a child, as it promotes violence.

First of all, I’ll bet most of these child psychologists
don’t even have children. They may have a nephew or
something, and think this qualifies them to start spouting off
about raising kids. These are the same people responsible for
eliminating dunce caps, and consequently setting comedy back twenty
years. It’s a shame that I never got to see a dunce cap in
person, but only learned about them second-hand from archaic Warner
Brothers cartoons. Someone should use the belt on these
“experts”.

Second, dodge ball doesn’t promote violence; junior high
locker rooms promote violence. By the time you actually get out on
the dodge ball court, you’re in a controlled environment,
complete with teams. But the locker room is a whole different
story. There are no teams in the locker room. It’s like
“Lord of the Flies” in there. Now, I’ve never
been to prison, but I have a feeling that it’s something like
those locker rooms. Everyone who isn’t in the normal classes
ends up in gym class for a freakish 45-minute brush with the
apocalypse.

It wasn’t so bad when you were an upperclassman because
you were bigger and everyone knew you, but remember being the
little 6th or 7th grader who is trying not to get noticed by those
hoodlums with overactive pituitary glands? Those were the kids who
actually danced at junior high dances before they ended up in
prison by the end of high school. It really didn’t take much
to get your ass whooped by these people, so you had to play your
cards just right. But there were always some poor kid’s P.E.
clothes or books in the urinal to remind you what happened to
people that got out of line.

Not to mention the always present underlying fear of being
tossed into the showers. To this day I don’t understand why
junior high locker rooms have showers. Do you think anybody would
be insane enough to voluntarily take his clothes off and shower in
that environment? By the time you even got to the shower,
you’d be bloody and stuffed in a locker. Everyone went to
their next class smelling awful. It was a detriment to your social
life, but so was being lynched.

And remember the poor kids who could never get their locker
combination to work? There was always one of them. He’d be a
couple lockers away from you, looking around pathetically, afraid
to ask for help for fear of being thrown in the showers with his
clothes on, hoping someone would help before the bullies found out.
You’d feel bad for him, and kind of whisper, “three
right, two left, one right.”

He couldn’t do it. “Could you do it for
me?”

“You think I’m crazy, fool? I’m not sticking
my neck out for you!” And then the bullies would be on him,
tipped off by an informant, and snapping shirts and towels. Usually
when you see towel snapping on TV, it’s a couple of guys
playfully bantering while they casually flick towels at each
other.

In real life, it’s more akin to hunting a pig with spears.
The poor kid tears around the locker room screaming in sheer terror
with a bunch of savages close on his heels. Then he’d turn a
corner just to run into a clever hunter who predicted his escape
route. All of a sudden, it would turn into a scene from “A
Clockwork Orange.” Everybody would gather around, whooping
and hollering. We weren’t really cheering on the vicious
attack, we were just excited that it wasn’t us being
mauled.

All this in addition to the standard fights that punctuated
junior high. No, dodge ball doesn’t breed violence. Locker
rooms breed violence.