cutthroat

I play on a field hockey team, some would say I am the captain - I prefer the organizational leader - but I guess captain is more accepted. We play 6 people on the field at once, and there are times when we just don't have enough to play. Usually we'll try and play down a player, but sometimes we have to recruit people from another team. When we do this we generally have to forfeit, unless the other team agrees that we don't have to. A forfeit just means that the other team wins automatically, but we can still play out the game. Our team is always forced to forfeit. We've even had to forfeit when we wanted to play down a few players.

Last week the other team had only 3 players and took on 3 from another team. They asked us if we wanted them to forfeit, and my team sent me - the captain - over the make the decision. I stood there, looking at these girls with disappointed faces asking me "do you want us to forfeit?" And I answered, much to my chagrin, "yes." Of course I made them forfeit. I made them forfeit because they would have made us forfeit. Eye for an eye, right?! But, I hadn't really wanted to make them forfeit. I had wanted to be the first one to let them play. It struck me how difficult it was to be the first person to do the right thing. How hard it was to stop the whole 'eye for an eye' mentality. If I hadn't made them forfeit, is there any guarantee that they would let us not forfeit later? Absolutely not. So I did the easy thing, the popular thing - I made them forfeit. But isn't there some middle ground between 'eye for an eye' and getting walked all over? There must be, sad that it is so hard to find.