Competing With Ourselves

Back when I was a kid I can remember my mother being on the phone with my aunt, long distance, for hours, drinking and arguing about politics.

A month later she'd complain about the bill.

Well, I may not get a bill, but for sure there's a toll, arguing about politics online. And I'm not making the world any better, wasting time and energy arguing politics either with people who want a very different world from the one I do, or fellow travellers who just support a different way of getting there.

Paying closer attention to my own behaviour, as opposed to that of others, is not only helping me get a grip, it's helping me gain perspective.

I posted something on Facebook yesterday morning which I shortly thereafter deleted. It was a partisan post with regard to foreign interference in our elections. But better people than me are trying to keep partisanship out of this problem, so I decided not to add to their load.

What do I know of foreign interference anyway?

Well, more than Michael Chong, I guess, who apparently had to be told post election that China had been trying to intimidate him.😀

I also put a "like" to a post by a friend with whom I'm not in agreement on a current topic, which I did instead of making a comment. I did that after noticing another friend, not in agreement with her either, give her a "like".

So instructive, his "like". Kindness in action. She needed it, he gave it to her, and so did I.

Back when I was on the parent council of my kids' elementary school I remember a certain parent being very agitated about what he perceived as a failure to make our kids compete with each other. He was worried they'd get run over in the workplace because they hadn't learned to compete with coworkers in our little JK-5 elementary school.

Later I was telling my brother about him and he said he'd finally asked one such parent, "Where do work that you have to compete with your coworkers?"

Unfortunately, we were raised in a competitive education system, not a cooperative one, so in spite of earnest professionals trying to teach our children a more evolved way of being in the world (although Gabor Mate would argue we were more evolved when we were living in cooperative, not competitive, hunter/gatherer tribes) we still imprinted a competitive streak onto our kids.

That's the real problem some Millennials are having. They aren't stuck because they got a ribbon in elementary school just for trying, they're stuck because they absorbed the wrong message, the one they got at home where influence is stronger. Instead of behaving cooperatively, so every body wins, they behave competitively, so winners and losers.

And everybody can't be a Bitcoin billionaire.

It's aggravating to me, particularly as a mother, that Pierre Poilievre, a rank and callow huckster, can get away with pretending to be the solution when he's in fact the problem. We need cooperation, not competition, more spreading of the wealth and more government investment in public services.

We need to help each other, particularly our lost young men, find meaningful ways to participate in and contribute to society.