To the editor:

People routinely turn everyday events into competitive sports. From skipping rocks, to flipping coins, to betting on anything that moves, we just can’t resist seeing the world as one big competition.

Humans have compulsively created what came to be competing warring religions, polarized political parties, narrowly defined gender roles, imaginary inferior races, enemy nations, entitled tribes, and a few spectacularly losing sports teams (Go Lions). On the surface, such competition might seem a harmless artifact of human mischief-making and boredom, but I began to wonder when a soccer mom sitting next to me on the bleachers suddenly shrieked out at her daydreaming five year old daughter, “get aggressive, Tara.”

It’s hard to determine ultimate winners and losers in terms of competing religions, but that hasn’t seemed to dampen our efforts. For example, there are over 35,000 various Christian sects around the globe; almost every one of which thinks they’ve got the exclusive inside track on the truth. Frankly, and with all due respect to the faithful, they will give you much better odds of winning at the casino.

Regardless of evidence to the contrary, humans happily go about envisioning life as a battle with the result that there are precious few winners and lots and lots of losers; good might occasionally triumph over evil in the movies, but not so often in real life. It seems to me that anything that divides people from one another is almost the exact opposite of most religious dogmas.

Competition in politics is supposed to produce a superior end product, if you buy the hype. The ultra wealthy fund the campaigns of their congressional stooges. The stooges spin simplified tales of good guys and bad guys to convince gullible voters to prop up their particular version of this whole corrupt mess.

Meanwhile, more and more Americans depend on food pantries to stay alive. More and more kids depend on subsidized lunches at school to survive. More and more Americans are forced to delay medical and dental care with, often, devastating results.

Maybe it’s “game over” time. Maybe it’s time to put away the sports metaphors, the white hats and the black hats, and to rethink what it means to be one of the nearly eight billion humans on Earth. The current path is clearly not sustainable.

My generation blew it. I sincerely hope the next ones do better. We need a few “wins.”