Posted on 03/20/2007 9:11:27 AM PDT by goldstategop
This past weekend, a friend of mine attended his 13-year-old son's baseball game. What he saw encapsulates a major reason many of us fear for the future of America and the West.
His son's team was winning 24-7 as the game entered the last inning. When he looked up at the scoreboard, he noticed that the score read 0-0. Naturally, he inquired as to what happened -- was the scoreboard perhaps broken? -- and was told that the winning team's coach asked the scoreboard keeper to change the score. He and some of the parents were concerned that the boys on the losing team felt humiliated.
In order to ensure that the boys losing by a lopsided score would not feel too bad, the score was changed.
As is happening throughout America, compassion trumped all other values.
Truth was the first value compassion trashed. In the name of compassion, the adults in charge decided to lie. The score was not 0-0; it was 24-7.
Wisdom was the second value compassion obliterated. It is unwise to the point of imbecilic to believe that the losing boys were in any way helped by changing the score. On the contrary, they learned lessons that will hamper their ability to mature.
They learned that someone will bail them out when they feel bad.
They learned that they do not have to deal with disappointment in life. Instead, someone in authority will take care of them. (This is how reliance on the state for personal problems -- the worldview of the Left -- is formed early in life.)
They learned that their feelings, not objective standards, are what society deems most important.
They learned that they are not responsible for their behavior. No matter how poorly they perform, there will be no consequences -- sort of like tenure for university professors.
They also learned to think in the feminine -- with an emphasis on feelings -- rather than to cultivate their innate masculine sense that winners win and losers learn to deal with it and move on to the next game.
At the same time, the boys on the winning team learned not to try their best. Why bother?
Building character was the third value trumped by compassion. People build character far more through handling defeat than through winning. The human being grows up only when forced to deal with disappointment. We remain children until the day we take full responsibility for our lives. Our increasingly feelings-based society has created a pandemic of immaturity in our society. And there are fewer and fewer maturity-creating institutions in our society. Indeed, the opposite is more often the case. Schools, for example, keep young people immature, none more so than college, which serves primarily to postpone adulthood.
The fourth value that compassion denied here was fairness. It is remarkable how often compassion-based liberals speak of "fairness" in formulating social policy given how unfair so many of their policies are. It was entirely unfair to the winning team to have their score expunged, all their work denied. But for the compassion-first crowd, the winning team is like "the rich" who earn "too much" and should therefore be penalized with a higher tax rate; the winning team scored "too many" runs to be allowed to keep them all.
Compassion in social policy almost always produces unfair results. Compassion for murderers allows them to keep their lives after taking the life of another. Compassion for minorities leads to affirmative action, which means that individuals who are not members of a designated minority will be treated unfairly. Compassion for immigrant children led to bilingual education, which subsequently prevented most of those children from advancing in American society.
Compassion as the primary determinant of behavior is effective in personal life. In making public policy, it is a morally and socially destructive guideline. In fact, it is so bad that thinking people must conclude that its primary purpose is to enable policy makers who are guided by compassion to feel good about themselves.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I remember my step-son playing tabletop hockey with the kid from downstairs. When the score was about 7-0 the kid downstairs quit. I said, you lose if you do that. He countered that he didn't lose because he quit. I told him that was worse than losing.
He's now a 24 year old high school drop-out and works at a Roast Beef sandwich place.
Excellent article by Mr. Prager. "Social," rather than individual, compassion is completely destructive. It dehumanizes the recipients and hardens souls against real fellow-feeling.
This is happening everywhere. All kids get awards, no winners, no rank in school, no grades, etc. If this was the way the real world worked, I would not care as much, but since competition is brutal and not going away in the workplace, I really think this is distructive to children and will not do them any favors later in life.
Of course, in Chess, one can resign when they see the gig is up.
One guy I used to play used to get real upset when he couldn't go all the way to checkmate. He was better than me at the time and I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. ;-)
Doesn't this happen in college or professional sports, too. Was it basketball? Maybe football. The losing side gets all pissed off if the the other team is beating them by a wide margin and keeps their best players in the game. Babies.
This is an excellent column.
We rarely had lopsided games like this, either. We figured out a way to pick sides fairly evenly, and if we were playing a baseball game and the score was 24-7 we'd trade one or two kids from one team to the other to "even it out." And we didn't do it to make the losing team feel any better, either . . . we did it because it's no more fun being on the winning end of a 24-7 score than the losing end.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
He was also the most compassionate human being I ever met. In his private life, he was constantly helping out people with problems, in some ways, it's what his life was all about. He volunteered for everything. But he hated the welfare state. He believed it was undignified, impersonal and deeply corrupting.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Ever watch Mad TV? They do plenty of Bush bashing but this week they had a sort of funny and topical skit. The coach of a little girls softball team had an award dinner for the players even though they didn't win a single game this season. He said "your parents have asked me to give an award to every single player so no one is left out." Then with some disgust he gives every kid a prize for some of the most ludicrous accomplishments, including "player who looks the most like Liza Minelli." Pretty funny, but really an accurate commentary on the reality of our society today.
What the left calls compassion is really white guilt. It is just another tool to justify redistribution of wealth, from your pockets to the public trough at which the liberals feed.
What the left calls compassion is really white guilt. It is just another tool to justify redistribution of wealth, from your pockets to the public trough at which the liberals feed.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Those were 7th grade boys, not 6-8 year olds just learning.
Whatever happened to America's competitive spirit?
I kept a record of all my chase matches with my father on the box. 31 matches: I was 0-29-2. My grandfather never 'let' me win at cards or anything and the result was that I'm more competitive than anyone I've ever met.
His teacher gave a special award to each student and he won "Best Effort." He stood quietly ashamed, shoulders slumped next to his projects as parents filed by...each one trying to make him feel better about himself by heaping on the praise. My husband and I said nothing but "Huh." (We're big meanies.)
On the way home in the car, he was abnormally quiet until completely out of the blue he started laughing himself silly. He said that he was going to work hard and do his best on every project for his entire life so he would never have to win the "Best Effort" award again.
If a second grader can understand the irony of that reward...and in the case Prager describes, know full well what the score is because they are tallying in their heads...is it any wonder that kids today have virtually no respect for adults or authority and believe almost nothing they are told?
Fortunately, my nearly 14 year old son still refers to his "best effort award" as one of the defining moments of his childhood. But we are SURE the lesson he learned is not the one his teacher intended.
Women
You're partially right. The Left values equality for their constituents, more than freedom, but not equality for themselves. The left, the politicians, academicians and even their Hollywood supporters, view themselves as an elite class that deserves to earn more than those in the private sector and be exempted from the sacrifices that they demand of the dominant class of white men. Rush likes to say that liberals go to school to learn how to run government. I say that liberals go to school to learn how to feed at the public trough and keep that trough full with your tax dollars by buying the votes of the special interest groups.
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