People aren't forgetting about the Balogun thing quickly enough

I thought enough time had passed to begin to quietly disentangle Balogun from the incident. The world should be starting to forget about it. But “What next for 10 of the World Cup’s biggest stars?” from the London desk of The Athletic gave me pause.

“[Balogun’s] influence on the team was so great that when he was sent off against Bosnia and Herzegovina, President Donald Trump personally (and successfully) intervened in an attempt to clear him of suspension for their round-of-16 game versus Belgium.”

They still have it as the main thing even. I wondered what could be going on?

By Geopolitics they mean our president. Here I think we find a key into the issue. It’s easy to forget that other places experience our president as Geopolitics. That’s the main part for them. Whereas we encounter our president first as our own soul revealing itself to itself. Take the Spain ceremony example. Geopolitics got “numbed out” for me as his lingering become representative of who I am.

The man pictured above is unmistakably, in a sense, me. It’s how it works with us and presidents, and particularly so with our one now because he has the most heightened version of so many of our most difficult traits – i.e. needs to feel important, but is lonely/sad, etc.

According to Tocqueville, we are this way because the line between individualism and selfishness is very thin. We each cut ourself off-and-away in a calm and mature spirit of individualism. But where and when our individualism absorbs itself into our selfishness is thereafter very difficult to track.

This contributes – along with the “numbed out” sensation – to it being hard to consider Geopolitics in a timely way. It didn’t occur to me, for instance, that our president bringing Balogun back could possibly be unfair until after I saw how mad everyone got at us. I guess I assumed the world already understood and accepted our president would be doing things like that.

Next I assumed everybody would drop the issue after we lost because that’s what I wanted them to do. It doesn’t seem like that’s happening. Every indication is the world is going to keep bringing up the Balogun thing for a while.