Italian soccer day

  This photo is of Italian Day in the collection of sports facilities formerly known as Oxford Park.
  As you can see, the Italian community in attendance is a small handful of geriatrics, a reflection of the local demographics.
   The Italian Day in this park has suffered from a declining Italian population, and others stopped coming since they stopped doing fireworks (apparently because it might damage the plastic grass on the fenced-off soccer field) and abolished the poll climb race, supposedly due to insurance reasons.
 So they seem to have combined the day with some sort of soccer day (the kid concussion sport) thing and, as you can see, even these kids' parents didn't even show up for the big trophy handout as there are far more people on stage than watching.
   Anyway, one organizer gets up to give a speech, I think named Simeon, and says that soccer is "keeping kids off the street." This is not just a fallacy, of course, it's a smug bit of self-congratulatory hogwash and with racist implications, assuming that kids are evil and would be doing bad things without his intervention.
   Who's to say they wouldn't be reading a Thomas Hardy or helping their mom paint the baby's bedroom? Sheesh.
   This isn't East-Side LA 1992, it's Montreal 2012. I think we all know that if the kids weren't playing soccer they wouldn't be robbing corner stores, they'd be playing on their computers or video game boxes.