Everybody Gets a Trophy

That seems to be the feeling of the “politically correct” crowd, especially when it comes to youth athletics. In order to not harm the self-esteem (so they say) of young athletes (or a child attempting to be an athlete), the P.C. police have deemed that everyone who participates in a sport, should get a trophy as a reward, just for participating. How absurd!

This might also be called the “Wussification of America”, as the incentive to excel is made meaningless if everyone gets a trophy. The cry of the liberals over the years is that we should “level the playing field”, which means every player should have an “equality of outcome”. What a more destructive way can there be to not reward competence, skill, and effort. Our country was founded and thrived on the principle of incentive to succeed with the result of monetary compensation. That’s why we are the pre-eminent country of the world, regardless of what our President Barack Hussein Obama thinks.

Once you take out incentive to succeed, you take the heart out of an individual or country and you become mediocre, not exceptional. It seems we are heading down the path of mediocrity.

Look at our schools, which at one time was the envy of the world, now many countries surpass us in educational competence. Math and science seem to have taken the biggest hit over the last few decades. It seems we are “dumbing down” our schools and society, our literature and cinema, and our news and culture. This obsession of the theory that everyone must be “equal” in income, talent, knowledge, and social status, is killing us as a nation.

Two areas of our society that does not seem to be affected is in professional sports and entertainment. Sometimes the obscene salaries of the players and coaches of sports teams, and Hollywood stars, which seems to multiplying year after year, but there is nary an outcry from the public. We don’t seem to want equality in our sports teams or our Hollywood idols, we want winners and we seem to accept the multi-million dollar salaries we pay them in order to get those winners. The incentive in athletics is to do better than the other guy and that it is what drives the athletes, and it has paid off for them financially and for their fans.

Why don’t we carry this striving for excellence to every facet of our lives. Our capitalistic, free enterprise system demands excellence and innovation as opposed to the Marxist/Socialist template of “equal poverty for all” or as Winston Churchill once opined, that Socialism is the philosophy of “the equal sharing of misery”

Yes, there will be losers and winners, as it has been since time immemorial, but in our society and culture, everyone has the opportunity to succeed, and yes, fail, but the incentive to succeed and reap monetary rewards is what drives us (or most of us) to succeed in life.

No, not everybody should get a trophy, unless it is earned by hard work, skill, and perseverance, the hell with artificially pumping up a persons self-esteem (ego) by giving him/her a trophy just by showing up and breathing. We all need an incentive to succeed, and then we’ll get a trophy.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann