Sporting Metaphors

I used to loathe school sport,
And because I read the red top press
-the only press allowed into the house-
and I tried to pay attention, I thought
that I vaguely 'understood' Party Politics,
at least I got some of the appeals for fairness.

Forty years on I realize that I understood
much less than I thought back then.
The politics used to leave me angry.
There was always a strange buzz of fear
on behalf of those I thought might go without,
and their forced sacrifice go unacknowledged.

I could not see how the arguments in the press
echoed some of the sharper words between my parents.
Both shouted incoherently about fidelity and finance,
for which, for my owning so little, I had no frame of reference.

And a few years later I could never work out
why I was being told to lie by instructors
who's job it was to teach me how to make a C.V.
They wanted me to say 'I am good at sports',
whilst I made up something up the sport
that in reality I was barefacedly lying about.

What I understand now about school sport
is that as long as it looked like mentoring,
But individual attention was only given
when public punishments were afoot,
then the schools could do their real work-
grading children by who their parents were
and where their fathers worked and drank,
whilst flattering them as so called 'adults'.

Community and society depended
on children being graded and stamped,
and their social mobility constricted.

But Party Politics still works like school sports,

1-The pupil with the richest parents will be team leader.

2-S/he will choose their team from the elect of their followers,

3-Anyone else the leader wants to butter up they will choose later,
from their team rejects; they exist to praise their team's progress.

4-Anyone who is not on their side and not following them
they will systematically say they disbelieve, and publicly discredit,

5-Leaders will steal as many good ideas from their enemy team
as they can, whilst discrediting where the ideas came from.

6-The teams operate as binaries, excluding any third party
/broader consideration of consensus 'for simplicity's sake'.

7-First past the post 'works' in the sense that
it is always the shortest route to the cheapest triumph.

I understand now what was systematically hidden back then;
I, and 99.99 percent of those I knew, never stood a chance,
But we had to go through the system of 'being educated'
and wait until near retirement to prove this always was the case.