Every Kid Gets a Trophy
Mar 20th, 2010 by Alex
I don’t care for political parties. I don’t usually wax political. In fact, I usually skim over the political articles in Rolling Stone, but this blurb from Matt Taibbi’s A Way Out for Obama (RS 1100) caught my eye.
Democrats and Republicans are basically the same on a lot of issues: They both voted for the Iraq War, the both love pork and useless weapons programs, they both lift their skirts for Wall Street. But they have one major stylistic difference: Republicans are unafraid to exercise power, while Democrats try to run government like one of those pansy-ass T-ball leagues, where every kid gets to have a hit, nobody loses, and nobody has to go home with an ouchie or hurt feelings.
Even in the context of Obama getting his shit together, it’s still pretty raw for a left-leaning columnist.
But more importantly, it reminds me of what I see in our schools all the time; the no-hurt-feelings mentality that has crept in and taken up residence. That our kids are infallible. That my kid couldn’t possibly have been disrespectful to a teacher over crummy test scores, that it must have been the teacher’s fault. And so on.
Sometimes you need to toss the niceties out the window and make with the program.
Word. Parents take the word of their kids over fellow grown adults all the time. Kids lie. Catch a clue.