GIVE ME A BREAK:LIFE IS not fair. We all know it, but how do you explain it to a 12-year-old? Soccer players win by handling the ball if they can get away with it. That was the lesson learned by all the children who watched that heartbreaking match, writes
KATE HOLMQUIST
The shock had many parents putting a steadying arm around a child and uttering those familiar words: “Sometimes, life is not fair.” Yet at the same time, boys and girls playing school soccer, who are taught never to handle the ball, have values of fair play instilled in them, as though fairness is a virtue that they will be expected to continue throughout their lives. For my son, this has extended to playing soccer with girls on the team, which is terrific – and not just because one of their best players is a girl.
Such illusions of fairness and equality can last for only so long in young lives. We’re giving our children a double message, making them behave fairly at home and in school, while all around them they can see that fairness is our flexible friend. We use the principle of fairness when it suits us, and ignore it when it doesn’t.
Instead of teaching fairness, should we be teaching our children the skills of bold, crass, barefaced cheek? Those are the values that have created the society we live in. We revere individuality, and we pour scorn on a dull life.
Fairness is about doing what is right for the greater good. Scandinavian societies, where people pay taxes at rates over 50 per cent so that everyone can be assured cradle-to-grave security are “fair”. Most of us in Ireland see such fairness as boring.
We prefer individuality. We reward moneymakers, and regard their rights as superior to our own. Banks have Nama, but the ordinary person in hock to the banks has nothing. Celebrities with enormous bosoms become millionaires, while the average girl who betters her brothers in exams will earn less than they do throughout her life.
Jordan, aka Katie Price, worked her way through the fairness question over the past weekend, then picked up her toys and went home from I'm a Celebritybecause the public voted her in for seven challenges in a row. For her, it just wasn't fair, even though she was being paid half a million euro to eat bugs. Dangling over a snake pit was a step too far.
That’s what makes Katie Price different from you and me. Given the chance to earn half a million euro by eating cockroaches and dangling over a snakepit, many of us with flooded houses or flooded by debt would gladly do it.
What makes the cheeky winners different is that they've taken the hard knocks and the risks, and therefore believe that they deserve more than those of us who have spent our lives playing it safe. Listening to a sanguine Harry Crosbie interviewed by Marian Finucane on her RTÉ Radio 1 show over the weekend, it occurred to me that he was spat out from his mother's womb knowing rules to a money-making game that most of us cannot fathom. We want to know the rules, which is why so many of us watch The Apprentice.
It has something to do with thinking creatively in a big way, with seeing the big picture. And it also requires seeing yourself and your fortunes as a universe of one. You will bend the world to your bidding by playing a clever game and seeing opportunities that other people can’t. Your success is well deserved because you’ve played fairly by the money-making rules. You deserve your riches because you’re a talented leader, not a pencil pusher.
Crosbie, whose legacy of a Docklands rescued from slum poverty is well deserved, wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life driving a forklift any more than Bill Cullen was going to spend his life as a garage mechanic or Jordan was going to settle down to a job as a secretary. They took risks and got the rewards.
Is it fair? The strike by public servants today comes out of this question. Public servants, as young people, made a choice between taking the safe route, which would ensure a job for life on steady increments and a pension, or the risky route, which could end either in disaster or wildest-dreams riches. Those followers who chose the safe route watched Ireland celebrate the leaders’ entrepreneurial spirit, while the followers comforted themselves with the apparent safety of their career paths.
Then came the crash, when the risk-taking ethos failed. Now everybody has to suffer for mistakes they didn’t even know were being made. Entrepreneurs with failed businesses are suffering too. But the public servants, from their point of view, never saw the big city lights and yet they’re expected to pay for them, like the boys and girls down on the farm who are asked to send money to the family black sheep in the big city who blew it.
Their anger and resentment at being asked to sacrifice income is understandable. But most of us have no sympathy for them. Most people’s view is that they have to “take the pain” because everybody is “taking the pain”, especially now that so many people and businesses are suffering due to the flooding, which has arrived like an act of God in the middle of a bad loss in a poker game.
Because life is not fair.