Competition

It’s been a long few weeks and I’m glad to finally be able to return to blogging. I’ve been very blessed to have many friends and family visit these last few weeks. It’s been wonderful and I miss you all already.

Numerous experiences I have had in the past year have led me to reflect on competition. I think it’s particularly forefront in my mind right now as the Olympics have been faithfully entertaining me almost constantly for the past week or two. Due to their attention from the media, sports are perhaps the most visible example of competition we consciously encounter. Yet competition permeates almost every aspect of our lives. We compete for jobs. We compete for promotions. We even compete with our friends and families, though hopefully we do so in a spirit of love and acceptance.

Here’s my beef with competition: people seem to despise it while simultaneously enjoying its perks. In many ways, competition breeds excellence. There is a reason that the best sports teams are those with the most athletes to pick from. It is the same reason that the best theater companies turn the most actors and actresses away after auditions. When we are forced to compete, we push ourselves to be the best we can. Teams of the best performers, regardless of the venue, create stellar results.

However, competition also breeds maliciousness and vindictive behavior. I cannot speak for everyone’s experience, but I found participating in high school activities to be a very painful experience at times. I was always encouraged to have fun and to only do the things I enjoyed. Yet it became increasingly difficult to separate the enjoyment of the activity with the dread of the politics and cruel behavior that others exhibited when competing for spots. One would not think that high school choir or the tennis team would be something to cry over, yet many tears were shed when scores were not upheld or spots in particular singing groups were not earned. Things would get ugly when jealousy led to cruel remarks and the spread of rumors.

At any rate, although these experiences felt important at that point in my life, they are barely a glimmer in my memory now. I mention it because it illustrates well that there are positive and negative aspects of competition.

Which brings me back to my beef with it: I wish people could enjoy the perks of competition being fully aware that it HAS perks, despite its imperfections. I am almost uncontrollably irritated when I hear people complain about competition on a national level while enjoying the privileges it allows. The best example I can conjure of this is within the health care system. Health care costs are rising at an exponential rate. I have personally experienced strain from this, as I have gone for extended periods of time in the last few years without insurance. I cherish the belief that health care is a universal human right, and it sickens me that not everyone around me receives the care that they need despite living in the wealthiest country on Earth.

Yet, there are two sides to this injustice. The United States also happens to have the best quality health care out there. It blows any other country’s system out of the water, especially those with universal healthcare. If you question this, I challenge you to take your relative with malignant cancer to Canada, Cuba, or any of a number of European states. Your may get treated, but it will take so long for them to be seen by a physician in the first place that it may be too late to help them. And even if they do get seen, the resources will be lacking, as they will be state funded. Ask any public school teacher or department of transportation worker in THIS country what the usual result of public funding happens to be. I see it every day at my office supply store job, as teachers are forced to buy materials out of pocket when the state fails to supply their classrooms.

So maybe public funding of healthcare isn’t necessarily the answer. Without intense competition between providers, our treatments will rival those available in nations whose citizens flock to the United States for their major medical problems. Plus, even fewer in this country will receive health care in the first place. They’ll have to wait so long for an appointment that they’ll die or become terminally ill before they are treated anyhow.

Here is what I propose about competition, be it in sports, healthcare, the arts, or whatever: perhaps competition is not the problem. Perhaps the problem is that we are currently competing for the wrong things. Imagine a world where health care systems were competing to give the best care possible to as many people as possible rather than competing to make the most profit and stay in business. And imagine a world where athletes were competing for the best times without the use of substances, rather than the best times with the most “legal” substances.

This probably sounds like a child’s dream at first, but I see it happening around me. Slowly but surely, society is shifting to compete for things that are friendlier to the environment. At work, paper companies are competing to offer the lowest priced paper made from recyclable materials. Because they are ALL offering that product, the competition is driving them to lower their prices again and again, making “greener” paper available to increasing numbers of consumers. This is only one of a myriad of examples. I wonder how many commercials I would count in a ten minute advertising slot that would emphasize environmentally friendly consumer options. There would certainly be more than even a year ago!

I personally am thankful for the role that competition has played in my life. It has pushed me to the very limits of what I thought possible for myself. It has lengthened my life expectancy and those of my loved ones, and will continue to create wonderful things in the future that I cannot even imagine. Every day, however, I try to reflect on what it means to compete for positive, meaningful things. I believe the world is what we make of it, and we can make competition an ally.

SPOILER ALERT-Dark Knight

Although I wrote it in the title of this post, I want to state again that if you have not seen the film Dark Knight yet, you will not want to read the following paragraphs. I saw it almost two weeks ago amidst throngs of excited moviegoers. I have a few comments to make.

First of all, I want to say that I was extremely impressed by the film. It was truly a fun, adrenaline pumping way to spend a few hours. The characters were interesting and at times mesmerizing. I do, however, have one major complaint that I will discuss in the content of this post.

Heath Ledger deeply impressed me with his skill in picking up the Joker where Jack Nicholson left off. He took an iconic character to a whole new level. I say this because I was confused with how the movie chose to employ the character. I want to clarify that nothing Ledger did or could have done confused me. I think I was confused by the writing.

The Joker clearly did not kill or do anything because he was motivated by money. Lighting a huge stack of bills on fire illustrated that quite well. He was motivated by his psycho-pathic, evil desire to demonstrate that human beings are corruptible and inherently self-centered (for instance, the ferry scene). The movie seemed to want to emphasize that the Joker was wrong. A boatload of convicted murderers and rapists managed to be selfless in risking their own lives to preserve the lives of others.

Now we come to Two-Face. Harvey Dent was supposed to represent the best of the best in strong, brave, good human beings. Yet he was corrupted by the Joker in a moment of vulnerability. The Joker seemed to have scored a victory, for he turned the man who Batman referred to as "the best of all of us" into a relentless murderer who seemed to relish terror.

Interestingly enough, my complaint with the writing does not lie in the movie's decision to transform Harvey Dent into Two-Face. I was extremely disappointed that Batman took the blame for Two-Face's murders.

It's not that I was frustrated at Batman being seen as a villain. It's not that the ending wrapped up as neatly as it did. (These are two complaints I've heard from others about the ending.) What frustrated me was that Batman and the police chief did not have enough faith in the people of Gotham to believe that they could still believe in the inherent goodness of others unless they had an exemplary figurehead in Harvey Dent. The ferry scene demonstrated that people will not necessarily destroy eachother to save their own skins, right? Hence the Joker was wrong in believing that people are always corruptible. Yet the heroes of the story did not seem to take that as an indicator that people can be trusted with the truth and maintain their hope in the future. They believed that it was only through an innocent man taking unjust blame for another's actions that they could maintain a sense of hope in the people of Gotham.

I believe that faith in others is a good thing. I was told more than once by my classmates in college that I have "too much faith in people." I frankly don't think I have enough. I am painfully aware of my own limitations and how I have disappointed others in the past. I am also jaded from times I have been disappointed. Yet I believe that people tend to live up to the expectations set before them. If we expect little from others, others will deliver little in return. Yet if we have true, GENUINE faith in those around us, we will find that others can be trusted with more than we ever imagined, even peoples' very lives. Most difficult of all, we will find that people can be trusted with the truth.

I will always believe that we need to have faith in others. And those who do are true superheroes.