The best revenge is living a good life

So, six days now, stuck in this airless space, and the mind begins to stray from the blackly riveting images with which TV desensitises us. There remains the amputee's sharp sense of grief and loss; a part of us is gone. New York belongs to all of us, and those shareholding nations who built it, loved it, lived in it or just dreamed of it now mourn the place and its children.

Lately, though, grief is accompanied by thudding dread as we watch America choose a spot at which it may perpetrate reciprocal atrocities. This will be one-sided and it will be awful, another Hiroshima (100,000 civilians) Nagasaki (60,000) , Laos (350,000) or Cambodia (600,000). Bracing oneself against mendacity doesn't feel like appropriate mourning.

We've been here before, pre-Gulf War. It is a commonplace in this solemn time to denounce sport as "trivial", to say that all this death has "put sport in perspective". And it is hard to argue in the face of grief. When David Duval asks if "we're supposed to be golfing?" at The Belfry while funerals proceed in his homeland, he comes across again as unselfish and decent.

And perhaps sport isn't anything profound. We take some of it (winning, losing, Beckham) too seriously, while not taking the heart of it (the rules, the spirit and the ability to live with both) seriously enough. Yet, I stand with sport right now. It is nothing trivial. It better frames our perspective on life than mass destruction does.

All the abuse runs the other way. The theft of sports phrases to inadequately describe war's horror is a real rape of the language. Those peasants upon whom bombs will rain, they will be in the strike zone as Bush quarterbacks the latest drive and they near endgame.

These people who will appropriate the language and the morality of our times in the coming weeks, all those ghouls whose deadening expertise we haven't been faced with since the Gulf War, these are the people who need perspective, these are the truly dysfunctional.

Sport is a distraction, dreamtime, folly. It's what keeps the lines from our face, the heaviness from our hearts. It's what bonds us and lets us identify with one another.

It is the best of us, too, a shared joy which lets us identify and mingle with each other. A year ago exactly we were in Sydney. Sure, sure, there's plenty that's phoney and counterfeit about Olympism, but for those few weeks as we bobbed about under the Harbour bridge and around the Opera House (architectural icons, it's poignant to reflect, matched only perhaps by the erased Towers of Manhattan), everyone was friends, everyone was united, and as the world gathered to watch on TV it was with happy anticipation. Call me sentimental, but ...

At this point there will be groans from the flinthearts who elbow their way to the front at a time like this. Get real, Pollyanna, they will say. People who can be serious (bullish even) about war wonder how we who love it can take sport so seriously. They are mystified by how we can engage emotionally with the outcome of a football game, be disappointed by a race, connect with a horse; they wonder how Michelle de Bruin's sins can make us cry while Roy Keane just makes us smile and shake our heads.

Well, we wonder how they can take war so lightly. There's something wrong with them, not with us. Some malfunction in their cobwebbed brains. Sport has more to do with the investigation of human possibility than war does. Sport has more to do with life.

There are times when we belittle sport by partaking in it wantonly or by pimping it to the panjandrums in blazers to have their way with. I can't imagine a Chinese Olympics unless that country's human rights record changes. I couldn't imagine us playing football against Yugoslavia while that country slaughtered Kosovans. But I can imagine sport in New York again. The joyful, resilient defiance of it. I can imagine it and wish for it, because that will be the victory of civilised people.

Lean-shanked men leaping for basketballs on the blacktopped, chainlinked courts that punctuate the city. The greedy cadences of hustlers scalping tickets outside Madison Square Garden as the pulse of excitement builds. Scuffling studs on Roosevelt Island amid the babble of tongues which soundtrack the soccer leagues that grip the city, every colour and creed and belief playing the beautiful game on those little aprons of grass.

Simple stuff. Couples skating at the Rockefeller Centre, fathers playing catch with their sons in Central Park while joggers pound the pathway around the reservoir. New York is a city made for distraction and enjoyment. Not war.

Right now, when simple justice is wilfully confused with revenge, we are asked to stand back and get our sense of perspective right. Well, nobody has felt any better when George W Bush has executed troubled kids in Texas, and they won't feel any better when they obliterate the enfeebled people of Kabul or Baghdad or wherever. There won't be closure, there is no such thing. No victims will be restored to us.

There is justice. There are rules. Sport, incidentally, strives to teach us about both; what is being talked about just now seeks to ignore both, despite our having built a civilisation upon them.

Then there is the best revenge: the living of happy and good lives, the busy trails of soccer moms and little league baseball coaches, the sight of peewees skating after pucks on frozen ponds, grown men playing touch football on sunny afternoons. The best revenge is people doing what they do best, living full lives.

That's what was taken away last Tuesday morning, that vision of sunlit moments and coiled energy which Manhattan, in particular, and the American dream in general offers us all. And that is what must be restored.

As America prepared to exfoliate the spore of its foreign policy, they played football in England this weekend and we played camogie in Croke Park and enjoyed sports in a thousand other places. With respectful distance, that is the most fitting style of mourning for a city of such unbounded gaiety and energy.