If Everybody Is a Winner, Everybody Is Second-Best

You heard them yourself if you were watching, and many million Americans were. As the Academy Awards were presented this year, each was announced not with “The winner is . . . ,” but with “The Oscar goes to. . . . “ It was, the Motion Picture Academy said, an attempt to make the losers feel better, as if it would. “No matter how you slice it,” the old saw goes, “it’s still bologna.” You don’t have to call the winner a winner to know that the fact you’re not carrying home an Oscar must mean something.

In fact, the academy is really a latecomer to the game of “let’s pretend we’re all winners.” It’s a pleasant little game, totally divorced from reality, of course, but all in the spirit of feel-good, and seemingly harmless.

In fact, it’s anything but. It’s part of a continuing trend--”the great leveling”--that is playing a significant role in ensuring a second-class future for this country.

It’s an idea that has grown out of compassion and good intentions, and we’ve been playing it for years in America. Its practical application may have begun in the schools at least 20 years ago, but its origins are clearly with Freud, who frightened people into thinking that any negative event could damage a child’s ego, probably irreparably. That was a misinterpretation, of course, but much of what we do is firmly based on misinterpretation. So, if the healthy child is the praised child, everything a child did must be called wonderful, whether it was or not.

The trouble is, children weren’t fooled. They learned that a quickly scribbled but colorful crayoned mess would elicit the same enthusiastic oohs and ahs from mom and teacher and wind up taped to the fridge door as easily as something they’d worked on all afternoon. Unfortunately, instead of fortifying their little egos, all it did was convince them that adults were either lying or stupid. And it actively discouraged them from doing their best--ever.

Reality, of course, isn’t quite as user-friendly. Badly produced goods and services get no oohs and ahs from people who just paid hard cash for them. The lessons come quickly and brutally to children who have grown up in the warmth of this kind of fake sunshine.

But that’s only the more obvious result of this kind of fuzzy thinking. Far worse is the way our society is being deprived of the benefits of the really meaningful. When misguided compassion marries anti-elitism the union produces a mutation in which the bad not only becomes good, but the good is brought down to the level of the bad until they meet half-way in a kind of warm-milk mediocrity. Life is an equation. You can’t elevate the inferior without devaluing the superior.

You wouldn’t expect Ann Landers to be guilty of this sort of silly thinking, but she is. Consider her advice to someone who remembered the horror of receiving no valentines in a class where receiving cards had become a kind of love competition, in which each recipient’s were counted and the totals announced. Landers’ advice: The teacher should have insisted that no valentines would be sent unless they were sent to everyone. What a nice, dumb idea.

Forget that sending valentines in class is hardly an educational activity, and the practice is probably a good clue to why our kids are lagging in the learning department. Forget that not everyone can afford the luxury of buying 30 valentines. Forget that the U.S. Postal Service still delivers door-to-door for a quarter and makes getting valentines really fun.

The point is, an ordained and regulated gesture becomes an empty gesture. What child cares if she gets a piece of colored heart-shaped paper when 29 other people have received exactly the same thing? When nothing is special, everything is pointless, and children get that message as quickly as anyone else. Only the card manufacturers benefit from this sort of mindless share-caring.

But those competing for Academy Awards aren’t children. They know about reality already. They know what benefits will accrue to those who take home the Oscar. Call the winners whatever you will, the losers are going to know they’ve lost. Silly parents and educators have now been joined by a silly academy. What’s next?