Future Anxiety

I was startled this week to read about a school principal in Massachusetts who, in what can only be described as a momentary lapse of reason, canceled a yearly “Honors Night” out of concerns that those who didn’t get an award would be “devastated”.  Say what?

Our culture seems to have accepted as normal the idea that there are no losers in life.  Somebody should tell that to the people who run professional sports franchises.  The very point of competition is to bring out superior performance from the participants in order for one of them to claim the title of “champion”.  I doubt the administrator in question would recommend scrapping the New England Patriots or the Red Sox.

I’ve been trying to come to terms with this conventional wisdom, but I cannot get there.  I’m old enough to have learned that in life there are always winners and losers.  Yeah, I said it – always!  From the very first day of kindergarten or elementary school we must learn to thrive in an environment where an authority figure (the teacher) defines whether or not you succeed in order to matriculate.  Success is universally understood to be based on whether you have learned a sufficient amount of history, mathematics, reading, etc. to qualify for the next level of learning.  If “success” is a good report card, then “failure” must be a not so good one. Substitute “winner” and “loser” for success and failure and it means roughly the same thing.

The basic lesson is clear: when you apply your talents, intellectual capacity, physical capabilities and socialization skills to going to school every day you will quickly see different results for different people.  Guess what?  That’s what happens when you become an adult, too.  The world is a competitive place, full of people who thirst for victory at any cost.  Trying to protect our children’s delicate emotional health by creating a feel-good, everybody wins environment is short cited at best.  As they grow they will begin to see the fallacy for what it is—pabulum wrapped in mediocrity.  Were this Shangri-La to actually exist it would likely be full of people who are completely content with just being sufficient, whether in school, at work or in their families themselves.

My very real anxiety about the future is hardly unique.  Perhaps every generation feels that shifts in values, standards, more’s, etc. will not have a happy ending.  I’ll concede to being a more vocal curmudgeon who likes to evangelize his social commentary, even if nobody is listening or cares.  All that notwithstanding, I predict that our corporeal dialing back of the drive to win will evolve us into a society where poor performance is readily accepted, mediocre performance is encouraged and winning performance is considered to be insensitive to the feelings of others.  This obsession with artificial equanimity will result in a major redefinition of the human spirit which I was taught about in school, at home and at church.

I don’t know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.