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There’s an obsession in America. It’s the fear of losing. Everyone has to do better than everyone else, and their kids have to be better than everyone else’s kids.

According to a report last night on NBC Nightly News, ambitious US parents are hiring ‘sports tutors’ to give their kids a leg-up on the rest of the field. Their aim: to turn kids into super-athletes who can saturate their parent’s egotistical demands by winning glory, and a place for themselves in college.

“Everyone wants their kid to be competitive,” says the mother of one twelve year old attending rigorous, daily, two-hour sessions five days a week at one of the many private sports facilities opening up throughout the nation, as this lucrative business is aggressively marketed to parents – at $35.00 per 2-hour session.

To an observer of life and culture in this country the comment, spoken with such obvious enthusiasm by this mother, encompasses virtually everything wrong with America today. Everybody in the US is competing with everyone else. There is no togetherness, except within families where all are dedicated to doing better than the folks next door, or further down the street.

Competition, the iron core of educational policies in this country for decades, is driving people apart from their neighbors. It’s the reason for those ridiculous car stickers:

“My Kid’s an Honor’s Student”,

or,

“My Gamer Kid Fragged Your Honor Student.”

We’ve all seen them.

At town boundaries throughout America stand old metal signs proclaiming the athletic achievements of once young townspeople, now either long dead or drawing their retirement pensions.

Who cares? Obviously, America cares; but why?

Why is it so important that your kid jumps higher, runs faster, or throws a ball further than the rest of the kids in the school? Is it so you can brag about it to your friends and make them feel inferior because their kids are just no good at sports?

If so, you should be ashamed, and you deserve to have no friends.

Competition is like religion, it segregates and divides, not just this country, but the world. Once, it wasn’t like that. Fifty years ago there was ‘sportsmanship’. It was the taking part, not the winning, that mattered. Professional athletes were barred from the Olympic Games. It was good to win a medal for one’s country, but it was the being there that really counted.

Now, American parents shell out thousands of dollars and ruin their kids’ childhoods by pushing them to limits of physical endurance no child should have to tolerate. All in the name of “Competition”.

There is another way.

Why not take “Competition” out of life altogether, and replace it with “Co-operation”?

Instead of the Jones’s wearing themselves and their kids out, by pushing them relentlessly towards achieving more than the Adams’ kids next door, wouldn’t it be nice if they all cooperated and helped each other to do well?

We could all sport new bumper stickers:

“Cooperation’s Cool, Competition’s for Clods.”

It’s a lesson that could also be carried into other aspects of life: the boardroom, the shop floor, the office, Capital Hill, the White House, attitudes towards other nations…….the list is almost endless.

One day it might even bring peace to this world, and we could all play our games and enjoy taking part – without that obsessive fear of losing.

^{NOTE: For those unaware of the meaning of the verb “to frag”: “Frag is a term from the Vietnam War, most commonly meaning to assassinate an unpopular member of one’s own fighting unit by dropping a fragmentation grenade into the victim’s tent at night.”}

Still think competition is a GOOD thing?

Filed under: Better ways

CNN just don’t get it, do they? This morning they announced that many Americans were just not bothering to get influenza vaccinations.

Why could this be, they pondered? Probably due to that ‘old wive’s tale’ that the shot itself could give you the disease, was the eventual conclusion reached by those two dozy, over-powdered, pin-ups fronting ‘American Morning’, or whatever it calls itself these days.

CNN is not the usual source of “news” in the Adam’s household. It was long ago consigned to the trash can of media junk, along with Fox and most other American cable stations that lie blatantly to their viewers every time the word “news” is decreed as their prime raison d’etre.

Gleaning a little of the events happening in that vast expanse of desert known vaguely as ‘outside of America’ – where the latest designer drug that may possibly help point naught-five percent of cancer suffers live ten minutes longer, or a lone South Carolina woman knitting woolly socks for the whole of the US military, is not necessarily the blazing headline of the moment – has to be in the more capable hands of the BBC or PBS, who both combine at five o’clock each morning to broadcast half an hour of BBC World News to the people of central Illinois.

Unfortunately, being as they’re all asleep at that time, they never see it.

Thanks to the modern technological wonder of video tape, however, the Adam’s household views the BBC World News over breakfast, a whole half-hour after its original broadcast. At least, that’s what happens on most weekday mornings. On Monday, for reasons not immediately apparent, either the video failed to record or PBS failed in its programming and screened a load of brain-numbing kids’ cartoons instead.

Now, as Monday was a school holiday in this part of the world, the assumption was drawn that in America there exists the eternal equation: kids on vacation equals kid’s cartoons on TV, so after a few choice curses the matter was forgotten. Arising this morning to find the video had failed to record BBC World News for a second time, posed a more calculating dilemma. Was the video at fault? Perhaps the tape cassette was defunct? All the usual tests a still sleep-numbed brain can devise at 5.45 in the morning failed to pinpoint the cause, so eventually and with a sense of self-disgust that one could stoop so low, the channel was switched to CNN, just as those of the pearly white teeth reached the conclusion that large swathes of their fellow citizens were stupid enough to believe idiotic fables.

Resisting the temptation to reach for the ‘OFF’ switch and settling instead for muting the following ten minutes of adverts, my hand was just about to release more of CNN’s tortured reasoning to my ears when a sudden notice flashed on the screen, demanding attention. The video, it proclaimed, was about to change channel and begin recording.

This was puzzling, as nothing gets recorded at 6.00am. It was the kitchen TV with inbuilt video, utilized only to record the 5.00am BBC World News, so it can be viewed over breakfast. The living room set has a Tivo digital recorder, used to capture everything else.

A quick check of the TV’s internal clock revealed the cause.

The kitchen TV is not new, but it’s Japanese – a Panasonic – and thanks to the clever, intuitive, design technology of Japanese companies, this set is programmed to recognize the date and switch automatically from summer time to winter time. It did so, exactly as it was supposed to – on Sunday 28th October.

Unfortunately, the US Congress is not programmed to do anything correctly, and in their usual blundering, interfering, and worthless manner, ordained – for reasons only apparent to them and certainly not to any sane, sensible human being on the planet – that the end of ‘daylight saving time’ be moved back a week to November 4th. Presumably their senilely affected minds failed to grasp the implications for millions of electronic devices throughout this nation.

What the Japanese spent years perfecting, the US Congress demolished in one swift stroke of the pen.

The clock on the Adam’s family kitchen TV has now been reset. Hopefully, it will record the BBC World News at its correct time on Wednesday morning.

Until then, American news sources will have to suffice. The NBC Nightly website has a video report on how the middle classes in America are being squeezed financially; barely, they say, managing to make it from one pay check to the next.

Hmmm! Given that a flu-shot costs around $30 plus the cost of a doctor appointment, maybe America’s citizens aren’t quite so stupid as the pin-ups on CNN seem to think. Maybe, after all, they just can’t afford flu shots.

Maybe, more folks are just plain poor.

Of course, it’s unlikely Congress will choose to fix that so easily, with one swift stroke of the pen – now is it?

Filed under: Time for change

Is George W Bush hell bent on wrecking the United Nations? Not content with raising his digit in contempt of other nations, and unilaterally imposing US sanctions on Iran for daring to implement a nuclear energy policy in the 21st Century, he deliberately berated Russia and China for not supporting America’s actions.

It seems the legacy George W Bush wishes to leave behind him is one of American alienation from the rest of the world. While certain European poodles still continue to lick their US master’s genitals, most of the world is sick to the back teeth of this gangster administration and its bully-boy policies.

Iran is in the US cross-hairs because it stands as a barrier to continued military interventionism in the Middle East. Bush and Co, in their infinite foolishness, thought Iraq the pushover that would allow a huge troop build-up on the Iraq-Iran border prior to a ground invasion to follow air-strikes on Iran’s Istafan nuclear facilities.

Instead, those troops are bogged down fighting Iraqis who want them out of their country. The US is equally determined it is never going to leave. Iraq must be subdued. The huge US military bases presently under construction throughout Iraq are for a purpose. That purpose is the consolidation of American fire-power prior to a preemptive strike – an invasion – against Iran. “Regime change”, or “bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people” will be the banner spewed out by US media outlets as “shock and awe” again glues American citizens to their TV screens.

Of course, right now it’s all still a Cheney pipedream.

Unless Iraq can be squelched into submission quickly, before the elections of 2008, America will be in no position militarily to take on the Iranian forces; a body they’ll find somewhat more hostile than the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein.

Hence, the present upsurge of rhetoric; the latest round of US sanctions against Iran, designed more to rouse anti-Iranian sentiment in the US than produce an effective stifling of Iran’s economy.

Today, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, likened America’s intention of siting a missile shield on his doorstep, to the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960’s, at the height of the Cold War. The comparison is wholly accurate. Admittedly, Poland is a little further from Russia than is Cuba from the Florida coast, but given the range of modern missiles the difference is insignificant.

Putin also compared the US administration to “a madman running around with a razor blade” when asked about America’s Iranian sanctions. No doubt he is acutely aware of the consequences should the US eventually prove successful in gaining a foothold in Iran.

They would be at the very gateway of Russia.

As stated earlier, it’s all a pipedream for the moment, but Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her support for military action against Iran. A change of face, or even sex, in the White House is no guarantee that the dream may not one day become reality.

Filed under: Games children play