CHEATING YOURSELF

You live in the world, you try your best to be as good and moral as you can be, you keep yourself informed of events, you carefully tend to your family and your private affairs, you try to be a good neighbor and help when you can. In short, you're a decent person trying his best in a difficult world and for that you are to be commended. You were raised well and taught the Golden Rule about treating others as you would have them treat you. You realize that we are but human beings and flawed so you cut people some slack, hoping for the same break when you fall short here and there along the way. Towards that end you've offered many a helping hand to your brothers and sisters when they have fallen and have reached out for that helping hand yourself a few times. No shame there.

Like Granny told you, the sin is not to fall, but instead to lie there and wallow in misery. And like all our Mamas told us, life is hard and often unfair. The unfair part is especially difficult for children to grasp, and when you hear a bunch of them playing together you hear many a shrill cry of "No fair!" or "Cheater, Cheater!" It goes against the grain of people to tolerate cheating, especially when most of us are steeped in the rules of the game and are doing our best to play fair, and even as grownups we recoil instinctively when cheating occurs. When it is done to us, we are outraged. When we do it to others we know we are doing something fundamentally very wrong, and getting away with it never erases the fact that we cheated to achieve or possess something. That knowledge never goes away.

Which is probably why Americans are so childlike in our outrage when cheating is exposed. Our system of government was purposely drawn up to take human nature into account, both the sublime in our natures and the basest instincts we possess as people. While the whole idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people was a huge leap of faith in our abilities to run our own affairs in an equitable way so that every body gets a fair shot at life and prosperity, the checks and balances in the distribution of power recognizes that we don't always play fair. Our Founding Father were all too aware of the tendency of some if us to try and grab all the cookies in the jar, leaving only crumbs for everybody else.

At the time of America's founding, almost every other nation was founded on the principles of built-in unfairness. You were born to your fate and that was that. Luckiest of all of course were the kings and princes and other assorted royalty, that breed of human born to rule and under no obligation at all to play fair. Courts of law if they even existed were a sad joke and the average person knew it and so got used to injustice and unfairness, although in their hearts they hated it since it made no sense at all. History is dotted with instances of peasant uprisings, slave rebellions and popular movements, all of which made possible the America Revolution and the Constitution that is the template for civil fairness against which all others are measured.

And so Americans look at the world and we scratch our heads, wondering how in China almost every single utterance from their own government is a ridiculously transparent lie and nobody questions it. We look at the Arab world and see half their population, the female half, enslaved, wrapped in sacks and in many cases under lifetime house arrest for no reason at all except maybe that their men prefer the sexual favors of teenage boys. And we say to ourselves: "How can this be?" In other nations we witness genocide and mass starvation while their leaders live in decadent luxury. We look at many nations routinely imprisoning or slaying the political opposition and we wonder who's in charge over there and why.

In our own nation we see corporate princes and corrupt politicians looting our treasury and transferring workers' wealth to their own pockets and we howl, and rightly so. This is still supposed to be the place with a level playing field. When we witness in 8 years less than 1% of our population appropriating over 90% of our nation's wealth for themselves, we wonder who let that happen. Well, we did. We backed the wrong horses in too many races, elected the cheaters to high office and elevated the greedy and insolent to run our great corporations, those people who as children we railed against for not playing by the rules. We have allowed ourselves to be fooled by people who skillfully manipulate our fears and present themselves as our saviors while their intentions all along were to enrich themselves by cheating.

The same people who are upset when a ball player of humble birth takes steroids in order to earn millions on the playing field looks the other way when people who were born wealthy steal billions. So, in a sense, we are all cheating and like all cheaters are cheating ourselves. Every cheater, no matter how amoral and callous, wonders in his heart of hearts how he would have made out if he played fair. And they know too, that being people of considerable natural ability and in some cases having been born to great material wealth, they might have gone just as far in life if they had only played it straight. Then their conscience would be clear, their nights restful. As average people, we have to wonder if we could have avoided a lot of stress and setbacks in our nation had we only taken the time to closely examine the people we choose to lead us. Those who take unlawful shortcuts in order to accumulate wealth or attempt to limit the hard-earned human rights of our citizens are cheaters, the kind of people America was designed to resist. And yet we elect them and hire them to run our corporations in the name of expediency. At what cost?

In baseball, nobody gets four strikes, not even the biggest superstars. Both sides field nine men, no more, no less. The outcome of the game is determined by the skill of the competitors, and occasionally, like in anything else, a little luck. But the game is on the level and the rules are obeyed. That's why baseball is America's national pastime - it is fair. While you can say that there are wealthy teams like the Yankees who have won 26 championships, more than any other team, you have to concede that they have lost more championships than anybody, 13 of them. That means that 13 times they were outplayed and defeated by a better team, no matter what the odds were going in. That's why the games are played, because anything can happen when you play fair and square.

So maybe it's time for people to vote with a different emotion than fear. We all know what America is supposed to be about, what we have been about for so many shining moments in history. We also know America's failures: slavery, Wounded Knee, Jim Crow, child labor, gunboat diplomacy to name a few. Another reason America has stood out is our willingness to confront our failings and to work to correct them. Now we have to stop cheating ourselves. We didn't get to be America by cutting corners on freedom and opportunity, nor did we get here by electing leaders who want to loot our treasury and gut our Bill of Rights. Check out your Congressman's record, see if he has been putting the nation's interest before his own. If not, well, "Strike three, yer out!!" It's a start. A set of honest umpires goes a long way towards getting the rest is us to play the game fair and square.