The Ethics of Snowboarding

This post is inspired by my afternoon of joyous festivities. Yes that’s right kids, I was reveling in my favorite winter pastime. A hobby that one of my best friends turned me on to five years ago. My passion, that is snowboarding.

Can I get a witness from the congregation?

For full effect, download “Screaming At The Wailing Wall” by Flogging Molly, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

This afternoon Rock Steady and I hit the slopes for some grand old times enjoying the winter weather and the man-times that us guys all want to enjoy every so often in our lives. Yes that’s right Chief Kent, I had a Bro-Date, and there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever!

In the midst of our ski-lift conversations, (which their will be a much more detailed post about later), Rock Steady brought up the point regarding the “ethics of the mountain” as he called it, or what standards of excellence actually exist among a culture who’s branded adjectives include “dope”, “sick” and “gnarly”.

Rock Steady: “Do they have ethics? I mean, do they have standards up here on the slopes? Like, is there a certain type of ethical culture that exists among them?” For the record, Rock Steady was using polysyllabic vocabulary, therefore the majority of the subjects we were conversing about would have stopped reading halfway through and looked to slurp down a Vicodin.

Swamp Thing: “I don’t know man, that’s a good question.”

Rock Steady: “Take that kid for example.” He pointed down below at a minor adolescent slowly coming to a stop just below our lift. Five feet behind where the eighth-grader had halted lay a wraparound facemask that had been lonely in the snow for the last hour. Reaching back with his ski pole, Pubescent Peter was trying to snatch it up.

Rock Steady: “He’s a fine specimen. I mean, he’s probably been eyeing that gear for the past three runs or so, waiting to see if someone else was going to pick it up. And since no one has, he thinks it’s rightfully his. But, is it really his? Does he have the right to take it?”

Rock Steady posed an interesting question that we all have debated in our minds every time we see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in our path, or when an extra bag of skittles falls from the vending machine before us. Are those material crumpets rightfully ours? Do we have the audacity, or rather the nobility to claim them as our own, or should we leave them be, and let their true owners pick them up? After a long day of shredding powder and falling on my coccyx, I pose the same rhetoric to all of the great honorable readers out there.

You be the judge.