More to say today

The LA Times carries an op-ed today about the Winter Olympics, complaining (as echoed by Stephen Colbert--note: that link may not stay current) that the US team isn't serious about winning. My first impulse was to dismiss this as more of the "we deserve to be number one no matter what" tripe that I first heard in the "Japan is beating us" 80s.

The author, Kevin Drum, makes two interesting points, though. First, he mentions that snowboarding outfits, with their baggy pants and hanging clothing, aren't exactly engineered to increase speed for what are ostensibly racing events. Second, he points out that one snowboarder is competing with her iPod in her ears, and another lost the gold when she decided, instead of gunning for the win, to make a cute, bad-ass pose at the end of her race.

It occurred to me that this is the generation raised on Little League games in which no one was declared a winner and everyone got a trophy. It's the generation put through the rat-maze of the "self esteem" movement, in which if you couldn't understand basic math, you got promoted to algebra and beyond anyway. (I know--I taught the kids 10 years older than these when I worked at a residential treatment center in the early 90s. They were in Algebra II and couldn't do basic multiplication. But it would have made them feel bad to be flunked, right? Let's not think of how bad they felt once they got to me.)

As a culture, we teach our kids that there is no reason to work or try. Why should the Olympics be any different? In the end, I thought that Drum was probably right to complain. Only it's not the athletes he should be scolding. It's the rest of us.

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