A friend of mine was a professional hockey player, and pointed out something that was surprising. He told me that youth leagues that allow fighting have fewer serious injuries than youth leagues that don’t. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive. But if you dig a level deeper, it isn’t as counterintuitive as it seems.
Hockey is a dangerous sport. You wear sharp blades on your feet which can be used to cause damage to an opponent. You carry a large wooden stick that can also be used to inflict damage on an opponent. All the players are on skates, on ice, which means they don’t have the kind of support to stand and hold their ground the way they would in most other sports.
The game moves very fast, and the referees can’t always see everything. So, it’s very easy in hockey to get an edge using a skate or a stick on another player when a ref isn’t looking. Yet, this can turn out to be very dangerous and damaging — even more sometimes than the attacking player intended. Fighting is used as a way to make sure this doesn’t happen very often.
In a non-fighting league, if you can get away with jabbing someone with a stick or stepping on them with a skate, and the ref doesn’t see it, you can inflict a serious injury with no punishment. But in a fighting league, you risk the retribution of a punch to the face.
I don’t know the stats on all of this but it sounds plausible and I’ve read similar arguments other places.
Now, let’s say you very strongly believe that fighting in youth hockey is wrong. And you even have data to show how many youths are hurt in hockey fights every year. And let’s say you staged a walkout or a protest to get fighting banned in youth hockey. Well, if what my friend says is true (and I realize it may not be), you have just made youth hockey players worse off, inadvertently.
When I see the protests for George Floyd, the walkouts planned by people at Facebook, the claims that ANTIFA causes all the problems at these protests, the claims that President Trump’s tweets and posts are inciting violence, and other similar things happening around the country, I always think about this story of youth hockey fights. When I form an opinion on these issues, I try to move slowly and thoughtfully and remember that these things are complex and intertwined, and actions we take to right one wrong may not work the way we anticipate.
Moving too quickly with too much anger just incites emotion over analysis, and often provides cover for those who have more nefarious motives. But, letting it sit too long as abstract analysis allows the emotion to cool down and makes it easy to end up doing nothing to fix the problems. But that’s why it’s so important to be careful, and thoughtful, and not assume we have it all figured out.
My primary mode of operation in these circumstances is to assume that everything that everyone says has some degree of truth, and that there is no full truth in any of these opinions. I’m always amazed at how confident some online pundits seem in how accurate their (usually simplistic) analysis of the situation is, and how strongly they believe they have the solution to it all.
Whether you think the problem is with the police, the President, ANTIFA, the protesters, none of the above, or all of the above, I think you should be more worried about how easy it is to misunderstand a complex set of interactions, and how likely it is that your actions could lead to surprising counterintuitive effects.
I was in high school when the Rodney King beating took place in 1991. That was almost 30 years ago. It seems police brutality hasn’t improved much. Yet every time one of these situations happens, there is outrage, then protests, then people go back to living their lives and forget about it for a few years. Maybe the solution isn’t protesting or walkouts or any massive short-term push. Maybe the solution is a few people committed to fighting for long term change. But, then again, it’s easy to go protest for a night. It’s hard to dedicate years of your life to grinding away for real change.
So we are probably stuck with short term thinking, and we will probably experience the counterintuitive effects from poorly thought out action plans. Which means very little will change.
