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USATODAY.com
OPINION
Can a high school
model repair
the nation's body
politic?
Chuck Raach,
usatoday.com from the Web, September 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — On a recent
Friday night I went to a high school football game to escape an especially nasty
week in politics.
Instead, I had the misfortune of sitting near a middle-aged man in a rain
slicker who spent the evening loudly denouncing officials, players and
everything else. His low moment came when a player on the opposing team
fell injured to the turf. Mr. Loudmouth yelled: "Get him off the
field!"
I describe this scene to make a larger point about our injured body politic.
When we fixate on the lack of civility in politics, we ignore the fact that
civility is equally endangered in other arenas of modern life. Consider
the rise of trash television that revels in celebrity miseries and fixates on
O.J. Simpson.
The morning after Mr. Loudmouth held forth from the football stands, The
Washington Post wrote about another suburban high school game. Two
football teams did not shake hands after a hotly contested game, and the winning
coach told The Post his team would not "back down from anyone. We're going
to stomp on your throat."
I won't name the coach or his school for a reason that might be instructive to
those in the political arena.
After emotions had cooled, the school's athletic director told me the coach was
extremely sorry for the episode, had apologized, and was working very hard to
repair relations in the long rivalry between the two schools. Since
redemption needs mercy to flower, pointing a national spotlight on a local high
school coach seeking amends would advance no civic good. He is not the
first, nor will he be the last, to try to make good out of a bad decision made
in the heat of the moment.
Politicians could learn from this example. In our public square these
days, saying you were wrong or apologizing for having bad judgment has become
tantamount to surrender or a fatal character flaw. Consequently, there is
no punishment for the routine impugning of motives, patriotism, honesty, honor,
or humanity of someone who may simply have a different ideology or a different
view. You don't back down from anyone. You stomp on their throats.
Eventually, no one believes in the game anymore.
Our body politic could benefit from the prescription of the Positive Coaching
Alliance (PCA), a nine-year-old organization that has trained 200,000 coaches
about the principles of fierce, but fair, competition. You can find it on
the Web at
www.positivecoach.org.
Its founder, ex-athlete and Stanford MBA Jim Thompson, says the group sees
itself as a "culture-change organization."
"The bad things that filter up are not representative of the whole," Thompson
said from his Stanford office. "There is a lot of really wholesome stuff
in high school sports."
But no one can call the public square wholesome under the dictionary definition:
"Conducive to moral or general well-being." As practiced today, American
politics' unremitting focus on what's broken and on exploiting the weaknesses of
others obscures what works and what ought to be shared goals. The context
of the whole game — the overall well-being of the nation — is scarce in today's
political debates.
Politics could benefit from PCA's holistic approach.
Thompson's organization teaches mentors to be "double-goal coaches."
"How do you get the best out of kids, kids who can win and honor the game?"
Thompson said.
For athletes, PCA coaches what it calls "triple-impact competitors."
"The first is they work hard to achieve personal mastery, to make themselves
better," Thompson said.
The second impact, Thompson said, is striving to make your teammates better.
And the third? "Competing by a code of honor, where you actually make the
game better," Thompson said.
Missing that third point is killing the body politic.
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