We Are All Doomed!

Americans line up, spend time and money, waiting for the football game, the rock concert or the blockbuster movie to begin, glued to their smartphones that they bought at Walmart with a credit card, using Facebook that is supported by advertising to gripe to their friends about how big business and the rich are ruining their lives; and they don’t see any connection.  No, all these rich people, most of whom got us to freely give them our money by providing goods and services and entertainment that we value, should now be forced by the government through taxes to give it back to us in the form of government services.  That’s what we have been manipulated into believing is the definition of fair and just.

Many Americans hear in church on Sunday that “suffering” is being beaten and nailed to a cross to die in the hot sun.  They wake up Monday thinking suffering is having a minor backache, and take the pills promising fast, all-day relief.  They show no sense of proportion.  They go on to ignore the fact that their achy body could stem from being overweight and out of shape, and that exercise might be a better long-term solution.  But being too busy is a good excuse to skip the exercise and healthy eating.  They also don’t see the connection between how they deal with their physical health and their financial problems.

Americans are never at a loss for things to protest or be offended by.  If you try to tell them to get a grip or man up (which is, in itself, offensive) you are accused of being an intolerant hater.  But toleration in the extreme is the same as enabling, and objecting to something out of a sincere desire to lead someone away from destructive behavior is not hateful.  When a pharmacy chain refuses to sell cigarettes, no one accuses them of hating smokers.  Having some things you don’t approve of and don’t condone used to be called having standards, now it's called lacking compassion.

And when nothing seems to be going right we turn to the government to fix it.  But as of this writing the presidential election is winding down to a race between what the majority of Americans agree are the poorest candidates in recent memory.  They are overwhelmingly seen as untrustworthy, while offering no positions and no vision. They are too busy accusing and insulting each other, mixing politics with comedy on late-night TV where hosts amuse us by messing up Trump’s hair or taking Clinton’s pulse.  Leaders are supposed to be people we can look up to and admire, people with virtue, who are more interested in the good of the country than their egos and job security.  When the Note 7 smartphone had battery problems, Samsung president admitted that it did not meet “the standard of excellence that you expect and deserve.”  Should we demand a similar apology from the Republican and Democrat National Committees?

No.  We have gotten exactly the kind of candidates we deserve!  They are appealing to the very sense of victimhood we seem to thrive on.  They will fight for us – assuming we can’t or won’t take care of ourselves, assuming that the odds are so stacked against us that only they can bail us out.

When I began writing these short essays almost five and a half years ago, my intention was to gather examples of how our behavior leads to the very consequences the media continues to brand as crises and epidemics.  Now, more than 560 posts later, I am far from running out of examples.  I don’t spend a lot of time searching for weird or exceptional examples.  These are from mainstream news sources and usually national advertising.  Common behaviors are taking America in the wrong direction and the trend continues.  For the past 20 years we see the same mistakes, the same advertising lures and come-ons, the same political appeals, the same handwringing in Washington and on the news.

I feel like the prophet Jeremiah, who was thrown into a well for telling people what they didn’t want to hear.  Unfortunately the truth is that behavior has consequences.  Behavior is not improving.  People are not learning from their mistakes and changing behavior, instead blaming predictable consequences on circumstances, government, political opponents, structural disadvantages, time crunch and distractions, bosses and teachers and authorities in general, big business and Wall Street.

When touring this country in the Nineteenth Century, Tocqueville was amazed by the success of the American experiment.  He later wrote, “Liberty cannot be established without morality.”  He often expressed morality as mores or habits of the heart, in other words right behavior.  As our values and behavior deteriorate, our liberty slips away, the experiment fails and we are all doomed.

Oscar Observations

The Academy Awards have managed again to stir up the diversity controversy.  The dispute and talk of a boycott is all over the news.  Last year I commented on a similar fuss pointing out that the Academy Awards show is really just one long commercial to sell movie tickets, that one or two years without a nominee of color had to be considered against the 16 years in a row prior to last year, and that those with good perspective understand that the issue of entertainment awards should be small potatoes when it comes to setting priorities in real life.  In the end, this is just a bunch of narcissists crying about not getting the attention they crave.

Then I asked myself, what about diversity in other areas?  Doesn’t the lack of diversity in the NBA, for example, teach us something?  Last season 74.4% of NBA players were African American and 23.3% were white.  The reason for this apparent imbalance is that fans reward their teams for winning basketball games.  Generally, those teams with the best players and the best teamwork win the most games, go to the playoffs, and rake in the big bucks from ticket sales, team apparel and television.  The sport is objective.  Whoever scores the most points wins.

Best movie (or actor), on the other hand, is not objective.  It’s a case of preference or opinion.  Maybe there are underlying prejudices, but like any category in the arts these days, it is very subjective.  In addition, the best picture voting process is complicated, and it is very possible that the winner isn’t even the one with the most first place votes.  (In case you are curious, here is a brief explanation of how it works.)  So the meaningfulness of advertising a movie as best picture is greatly diminished.  But either way it’s still no big deal.

In doing the research, though, I learned something even more surprising.  Diversity does not mean what I always thought it did.  It doesn’t mean a range of different perspectives or backgrounds or experiences at all!  The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport gives the NBA an A+ rating for diversity.  This is how they explain their calculations:  “Currently, 24 percent of the U.S. population is comprised of people of color, thus an A was achieved if 24 percent of the positions were held by people of color. A position was determined to have earned a B if people of color held 12 percent of the positions, and a C was earned if people of color held only 9 percent of positions.”  (By “position” they mean player, front office, coach, owner, etc.)

So all people of color represented 76.6%, which is more than 24%.  That equals an A+.  One would assume from the above concept of diversity that the curve would go down on both sides from the 24%, that too many would be as bad as too few and cause diversity to start to diminish.  The more people were alike, the less diversity.  Since that is clearly not the case, this organization has a different definition; and if there were no white players at all, the diversity grade would still be A+.  (Regular readers know from my other posts that I don’t buy a definition of diversity that relies on skin color.  You can’t walk into a room and see into people’s heads, but that is another topic.)

So before we get too excited about lack of diversity in Hollywood, we should probably decide whether everybody agrees on a single definition.  I guess we need to mix everyone together by some formula, which is easy to do when the whole exercise is subjective anyway.  The alternative would be to treat everyone the same – but that might mean having only a single category for best actor and best supporting actor, not splitting into male and female categories.  Wow, that would open up another can of worms!

Perspective and Entertainment

Last week the controversy about Ray Rice, the NFL and domestic abuse got new legs when the video of the battery on the elevator was released.  Many people felt renewed shock and began calling for the resignations of the league commissioner, the coach and the team owner.  They wanted to punish everyone involved and demanded new attention on the issue of domestic violence.  Now the FBI along with the US Senate may be organizing investigations of the actions of the league – what did they know and when did they know it?

Outrage at domestic violence is understandable and efforts should be made to reduce the incidents, to educate and to punish the offenders; but using perspective calls up another question, a question ignored by media and pundits, a question that may be the most important one:  Why is Ray Rice, or any other athlete for that matter, considered a role model?

If any other ordinary individual had committed this act, it would have been equally appalling, but it would not have been front page, national news.  It would have been covered by the local news and (unfortunately) forgotten much sooner.  Because it involves a person who carries a football for 16 weekends a year it’s deemed important.  He is being a bad example to our kids who want to grow up to be like him.  The main reason they do is that he is famous and made a lot of money, tens of millions of dollars, for carrying a football.

Step back and think about it for a minute.  Our society values and honors and idolizes people who play games and who entertain us in movies, on the stage and on television.  We think they are so great that we tune in to watch them congratulate each other at awards shows.  This is upside down!  We pay lip service to teachers, firefighters, police, veterans, innovators, hard-working Americans, even parents and grandparents; but when it’s time to put down our money, we over pay and look up to baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, television and movie stars.  We buy jerseys and souvenirs, pester them for autographs, pay large amounts of money for tickets, spend inordinate amounts of our free time watching games, building fantasy teams while following the latest news about them and support the paparazzi by buying the magazines and watching TV shows that feature celebrity gossip.  (Sometimes it seems like we pay more attention to their marriages than we do to our own!)

We have so much free time and disposable income that we can afford to squander it on continual entertainment.  Whereas a few hundred years ago the main concern in life for all but a privileged few was survival, today our lives are filled with distractions and entertainment to the point where we have to carry it all with us on our phones!  People rarely stop to think how lucky we are to have such easy lives.  Entertainment has become a new subsistence, almost as important as food and air.  We feel empty and deprived without it.  We raise the best, or at least the best-hyped, entertainers to high levels of fame and fortune.  We give them power over our lives that borders on worship and continue to be shocked when some act like they translate this adoration into permission to act above the law.

In an ideal world where everyone (or even most) had perspective we would tell our kids, “This inconsequential man hit his girlfriend.  It’s wrong; don’t act that way.”  That would be the end of it.  Until then it’s important to ask why it takes a celebrity to call attention to unacceptable behavior, and why we seem disproportionately surprised and outraged when they do.

Perspective on Batman

Wow, right in the middle of a series of postings on how important it is to keep life in perspective, living according to our core values, practicing moderation and separating the important from the trivial, I see this news story.  Three days before the opening of the latest Batman movie, the Rotten Tomatoes website had to suspend comments because they “got way out of hand.”  Angry fans reacted harshly to negative reviews of the film and made profane and threatening remarks about the critics who wrote them.  The staff in charge of policing the comments to ensure they were in line with the site’s standards were temporarily overwhelmed by the volume of hate-based reactions.

Remember, these are angry, threatening comments made about unfavorable movie reviews by fans who have not yet seen the movie!  First of all, where are they getting their information?  Second, where is their perspective?  In America both critics and fans have a right to their opinions, but this is only a movie that they are fighting about.  Quick, name ten things more important in your life than a movie.  It shouldn’t be hard.  Most people can probably name a hundred with ease, but when we lose perspective we go crazy about such unimportant things.

This is very important to remember as the baseball season heads toward the playoffs, the football season gets under way and the folks at NBC try to convince us that the Olympic events are among the most important things in our lives.  It's not just movie-goers who get unreasonably upset and excited.  Except for the athletes and the filmmakers, this is only entertainment.   If it angers more than it entertains, then we probably have some serious soul-searching to do.  Why do we place such a high value on these things, and what gets pushed off our personal priority list as a result?

THANK YOU

This is my 120th posting, every Monday and Friday for 60 weeks.  Over this time the number of page views has been steadily increasing, and I would like to tell you how much I appreciate your taking the time to read my blog.  I promise to continue my efforts to keep these pages interesting and thought-provoking.  I know I am presenting some challenging ideas intended for a thoughtful audience not the usual cute or entertaining fare that "goes viral."  I hope you continue to visit and encourage your friends to participate in this modest campaign to improve our consequences by better understanding and improving our behavior.  Thank you, James Jeray.