Tom Brady switched teams. Okay, done – that should have been the end of him. Too old to play the game anymore, tired of freezing in Boston, he moved to Florida like the rest of the retirees. And then he won the Super Bowl. Again. For the seventh time. Tom Brady is now the ‘winningest’ franchise in Major League Football. Let the hatred begin.
Why hatred? Because America hates winners. Most people, on hearing that phrase, will quickly deny it. After all, don’t we worship our sports heroes, lavish money on our singers and actors, go out of the way to try to meet our favorite celebs and brag forever if we personally know someone even a little successful? And yet we hate them in the same breath. Why? The answer is simple – jealousy. Because we know we’re losers, and we can’t stand the fact that someone else isn’t. In fact, we want everyone else to be bigger losers than we are.
Think about it – what is the most common ‘feel-good’ movie plot out there? The underdog story, of course. The idea that someone can come up from nothing and become great through hard work, or heart, or just plain faith – that just warms the cockles of our hearts. We see ourselves in the underdog story. And if the underdog wins a second time – hey, fantastic! Way to represent. Don’t win a third time. Let someone else have a chance. If they keep winning – well, they’re obviously cheating, aren’t they? Billionaires are all money-grubbing criminals, rock stars are all drug-addled sex addicts and supermodels are all empty-headed tarts. Do you see that every one of these judgements are entirely fueled and inspired by rotten jealousy? Don’t believe it? Then you’re blind.
Now, I’m not going to stand here and insist that every successful person is a saint – that’s just as narrow-minded and damaging as its opposite number. Certainly, there are those people who fulfill the stereotype. It couldn’t be a stereotype if no one was like that. But you just can’t paint an entire sub-class of people with a single brush. It’s ridiculous, unfair and limits you a great deal more than it limits them. In fact, you can’t judge an entire group – any group – by the actions of a few isolated members. That’s called bigotry, and we need to get past all that.
It’s long since past time for us to realize that we all need to grow up and start seeing people for what they really are – fallible, quirky, grungy, hilarious, ridiculous and strange – all of them individuals. And when we start to do that, something bizarre starts to happen inside us. When we can begin to forgive others for being different from us, we start being able to forgive ourselves. And we all of us need a lot of forgiveness. Forgiveness breeds tolerance. Tolerance is the first step on the road to freedom. And freedom opens us up to the possibility of real success – success on our own terms. To hell with jealousy. By the way, do you know what the opposite of love is? It’s not hatred. It’s fear. That’s why we’re told that ‘perfect love casts out all fear’ – because love is the antidote to fear. To hell with fear. The Beatles once said, ‘all you need is love’. They weren’t wrong. To echo an actual saint – ‘Little children, love one another’.
End of sermon. (hey, I am a PK, you know?)
pax et ama
TGC