Ed Andrews: Feeling special
Riding a skateboard may make you feel amazing, but it doesn't make you better than anyone else.
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Outside of work, I’m a boxer. I train many times a week at a gym in Shoreditch and I love it. Because I enjoy it so much, I’ve been thinking recently about how we as boxers are really special and totally different to everybody else. Let me explain…
Well, firstly, if you are a boxer, you are immediately not a racist – it just doesn’t happen. Secondly, as a boxer, no other humans can take a punch the way we do. Some people take maybe four punches like that in their whole life and are always talking about them at parties: we take more than that a week! Also, as a boxer, we are all really good at catching falling cups. Most people can’t do that, but you can if you are a boxer.
That sounds completely ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, if you are Rudy Johnson, it’s exactly these reasons that make skateboarders so special, as highlighted in his recent video on Crailtap, Top 5 Reasons Why Skateboarders Are Different Than Everyone Else [sic].
Apparently, there were a few others ones that didn’t make the cut including skateboarders being able to swim faster than sharks, being able to breathe in space and habitually acing the Daz Doorstep Challenge.
Despite being very fond of skateboarding myself, I have a real deep aversion to such bold statements as these. Not only are they smug, self-aggrandising and potentially exclusionary, they are highly inaccurate too.
Not that I’ve been counting but there are literally millions of skateboarders worldwide, all with their different take on rolling around on hard surfaces. There are clean-cut jock contest skaters, hesh all-terrain chargers, technical ledge dancers, nerdy freestylers, weekend cruisers and daredevil downhill sliders - there’s even the plain bizarre (like the person who was down Mile End skate park at the weekend). If anything, such diversity suggests a multitude of mindsets; not one unifying set of characteristics that makes anyone who picks up a deck immediately ‘special’ and beset with a life skill set that is up there with being able to walk on water and turn water into wine.
I don’t mean to pick on Johnson in particularly, he’s just one of many who peddle such cheesey sentiments without the slightest hint of embarrassment – very often just to sell product on the back of it. But the simple truth is that having a skateboard and riding it regularly doesn’t immediately make you a more enlightened, urbane and sophisticated individual: in the same way that not owning a skateboard doesn’t make you any of those things. Yeah, it may be something that has a profound effect on people’s lives and can be a very positive outlet, but let’s not start putting up barriers to make skateboarding in to some sort of Masonic club through hyperbole and clichés like these.
Get a skateboard, use it and enjoy it for what it is. By all means encourage people to get into it – because it is awesome! – but don’t be like Rudy and make out that skateboarders are better than everyone else. After all, it’s just a microcosm of wider society that’s beset with the great, the good and a small group of people I like to refer to as “tossers”!
As history tells us, bad things happen when people start believing their own ‘group’ is in some way superior…
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Feeling special (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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