During a recent visit to the playground with the grands, I caught myself joining in the cacophonous praise-fest with all of the millennial mommies and daddies jockeying for air space as they helicoptered over their precocious progeny.
"Yay! Good job!"
"Way to go!"
"Awesome. Yay!" ("Yay" comes up a lot.)
We were all shouting praises for our little ankle-biters' uncanny ability to simply sit at the top of the slide and just let gravity take over.
Or throw a stone in a puddle.
Or poke a stick in some unsuspecting, slightly less aggressive kid's eye.
The deafening chorus of "yays" was accompanied by the digitally generated artificial clicks of iPhones capturing the "incredible" moment for preservation on countless Facebook pages.
I stopped myself mid-yay and reflected on the larger behavioral implications of the ridiculous scene that was playing out on the playground.
Praise is a precious commodity and should be dispensed with judicious forethought. Overuse--or worse, disingenuous use--relegates what could have and should have been a valuable character-building experience to the trash heap of sappy superlatives.
I think it was Groucho Marx who once said that praise is the opiate of the people. Little playground curtain-crawlers (my grandkids included) are being fed a steady diet of "yays" and "awesomes" for such insignificant achievements as smearing peanut butter on an iPad, successfully steering the ergonomically designed rubber-handled fork of Mac 'n' Cheese into her mouth and not her ear (or on mommy's Liz Claiborne blouse), jerking the nice kitty's tail only once, or not calling the spooky old man who lives next door a poopie-head to his yellowed, Stephen King-esque toothy grin.
If we don't become more appropriate with our adulatory approbations they might someday, oh, I don't know, maybe expect a soccer trophy inscribed with "Participant." And before you know it--bam--we will have created the next generation of millennial monsters demanding and getting "yays" and "awesomes" just for showing up at work less than a half-hour late. Growing to become adults with egos the size of lawyers or (shudder)--writers.
When I was a kid ... (a preface I find myself using more and more frequently as both my grandkids and I age) expectation overruled praise. When I was a 12-year-old I milked 21 bellowing Holsteins, plowed 30 acres of bottomland sod, and loaded 16 tons of No. 9 coal all before lunch (sorry, that may be somewhat of an exaggeration--it was probably more like 20 acres). My dad just looked at me as I staggered through the kitchen door and proudly told him all that I had done and said, "You forget to water the horses?"
If the old man didn't know anything else, he knew how to build character. Sometimes he did such a good job I couldn't sit down for a week.
And so, dear reader, I sing in praise of the mediocre.
Reflect for just a moment with me on simpler times when we were experiencing our formative years. Specifically--high school. I will be the first to confess that I was an apostle of the study hall back-row gang. You know--where all of us C+ students stewed in a mélange of mischief. We would perform not-so-nice pranks that variously included such socially deviant things as honey-smeared desk seats or "kick me" signs taped to the back of some unsuspecting nerd (I've had my share of 'em). And the all-time, nearly universal classic: midnight raids that made a whole new use of Charmin.
How many of those pointy-headed nattering nabobs (kudos to Spiro) covetously populating the front-row seats clamoring for "yays" and "awesomes" just for spelling "Missusippi" correctly do you remember rolling in the aisles with you and your hoodlum cut-ups when Mary Alice McDermott's plaid skirt stuck to her seat and she cried all the way to the girls' restroom while running in her underwear?
And how many of them ever attended those countless college keggers where you nurtured your "character-building" skills by parading around in your Fruit of the Loom tighty whities and Tom Cruise sunglasses?
Now, before you rush to your laptop to rip me a new one, chill for just a moment and let the subtlety (or lack of) of this little screed to sink in.
Allow your kids to be kids. Let them experience failure. Provide them with the opportunity to see that we are not living in a perfect society and that egalitarianism oftentimes takes a back seat to undeserved preferential treatment and just plain bad luck.
The best advice I ever received was: Never cease to be amazed. I don't remember who said it: Dad? My drunk uncle? Sister Mary Agnes? It really doesn't matter. The message is clear: The bluebird's song. The butterfly's flight. The smell of an orange. Simple things. Ordinary by some standards. Mediocre? Maybe. But each one of them no less than amazing. And none of them requiring "yays" or "awesomes."
Mediocre succeeds quite well. If you don't believe it--take another look at Donald Trump.
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Bill Rausch is a freelance writer from Little Rock. Email him at williamrausch25@yahoo.com.
Editorial on 04/23/2016