Participating

YOU MIGHT NOT WIN the Super Bowl, for instance, but you can show up on the playground at recess, catch a couple of passes in a pick up touch football game, lose with your team by a point or two, then go back to class a bit pissed at having lost, but relaxed, smiling, and feeling pretty good about your personal performance, exercise, fun, and participation. And that, arguably, is a good attitude, a healthy attitude, the "right" attitude. Leave it to American culture to have no idea what the right attitude is about anything, but to decide arbitrarily, then impose the arbitrary choice upon the world. Noticing, like most people, that American Darwinistic competitive culture, with its win at any and all cost moral fiber, had subsumed America's children, the bleeding hearts started handing out participation trophies. In my childhood, over fifty years ago, they were unknown. Either you won or you didn't. But I also recall that back then it actually something to finish i second place, or even third, in a field of, say five. Winning wasn't everything. Nor was it the only thing. But somewhere along the way it became everything, fueled, one might wonder, by some unseen but insidious indoctrination of corporate competitive culture? When in doubt, blame corporate indoctrination. Maybe we handed out a few too many participation trophies, and patted a few too many last place losers on the back, because, sure enough, one way or another, we inspired the ire of America's conservative community, fearing as usual the demise of tradition. Political correctness, which began with liberal's poking fun at the artificial equality of everyone espoused in Mao's little red book, morphed from basic decency and equality into subversive assault on American core values, chief among them, the right to be rude. Political correctness became the laughing stock of mainstream America. when you've been mocked by a right wing mob, you've been mocked. Somewhere, in fact probably most everywhere, there are participation trophies sitting in the back of the closet, gathering dust, awaiting their inevitable trip to the dumpster. There are more to come; the very notion of celebrating and rewarding fun and participation is becoming about as acceptable in rough and tumble Trumpland as opening doors for other people, just because they're people.