The Birth Of My Poor Sportsmanship

When I was in elementary school, I belonged to an organization called Future Problem Solving Program International. Elementary school students were given a problem that might affect their community and they had several months to brainstorm solutions, and present their best researched, most creative solution to the problem. I went ALL IN to this group. There were five or six of us in the group, and I don’t remember the name or face of a single other person. All I remember is the moment when all my optimism and enjoyment of the concept of solving problems was replaced with the rage of UNFARINESS when we lost to the team that hosted the regional finals.

The problem we fourth or fifth graders were given to solve was: Acid Rain. It was the eighties and industry was as uninterested in helping our environment as they are now but society hadn’t yet guilted them into pretending they cared about anything but profits. Nobody was making rainbow versions of their logos for Pride Month, promoting diverse members of their staff during Black History Month or Womens’ Month or AAIPI Month, and nobody was telling you that you could cure the environment by using fewer plastic straws while they dumped thousands of tons of unbiodegradable waste into the ocean. They had slogans like “Coal. Fuck you, we’ve been killing children for generations, why do you suddenly care now?” and “The Republican Party. AIDS is a faggot disease. We miss slavery.”

I don’t remember any of the other schools’ specific solutions to the problem acid rain presented to their communities. I just remember they were all pretty similar. They involved talking with companies, making regulations for environmental impact. A few suggested mild protesting, and one even made potential protest signs. There were three or four schools that I thought might win. The fake sign school was my pick if we lost. But I couldn’t imagine us losing. Everyone else’s ideas were focused on getting companies to change their habits to help the environment. We had gone in a very different direction.

I can no longer find the research that supports this theory but I promise you it was real. In the mid-1980s, there was an experiment in wetlands that found that certain species of birds had something in their feces that reduced the acidity in water. So wetlands with higher percentages of these birds, the one I remember being The Black Backed Gull, had much lower acid levels in the ponds and rivers they lived near. So we came up with a program that bred these birds, who didn’t have large populations at the time and who didn’t have a noticeably negative impact on the environment, and made sure there were ample nesting areas for them.

Looking back at this, as an adult, I appreciate our creativity but I can also see why the judges weren’t super excited about our Save The Water Supply By Adding Bird Shit campaign. But, y’all there’s already bird shit in that water. What’s a little more, if we want less acid rain? These judges didn’t know that this solution was so, pardon me, Bird Shit Crazy that it was So Debunked by the 2020s that The Internet, which no one could have conceived of in 198whatever, didn’t even record the study’s existence.

During the competition, however, I was convinced we would win. We had spent so much time researching this, and we learned how to convince adults of this study because it took FOREVER to convince our adult coach to let us follow through with this idea. For some reason.

I really thought there were only two threats, the team that had fake protesting signs, and the school that had done the best job, imo, presenting the same Let’s Just Talk It Out And Make Sensible Environmental Laws tactic. Well, that team came in third. The fake protesting sign team came in second. We had done it. We had …

I don’t remember what school hosted this event. Let’s call it Privileged Cheaters Academy. Well, PCA didn’t just win this event, they won by a landslide. The score differential between second and third place was a hoarse whisper, Privileged Cheaters Academy won by an Air Raid Siren. And they were not graceful winners. One of the winning kids flipped off the second place school’s coach and was chastised in the mildest way possible.

I was sour. It only got worse when all of the scores were released. We’d come in last place. Not only had we lost to homefield advantage, every team that had presented the same bland Play Nice And The Law Will Make Acid Rain Completely Disappear In A Few Decades had positively annihilated our Bird Shit solution.
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Shortly after the scores were posted, a local journalist took pictures of all the teams from some newspaper. They printed all of them. Even ours. Our picture, which showed one carefree, blonde adult, three or four smiling children with unmemorable faces, and me, wearing the tear-stained scowl of a super villain engineering his first Death Ray in his head.