Not the world it could have been, but maybe someday ...

My friend Mick made an interesting comment in response to something on Facebook the other day.

"This is not the world it could have been."

A truly fascinating comment, but one that is about as open-ended as they come.

Not the world it could have been because Eve got Adam to eat the apple?

Not the world it could have been because Noah forgot to bring the dinosaurs with him?

Not the world it could have been if Jesus had said hey, forget Jerusalem, let's go to the beach?

Actually, my guess is that what my friend means is that this is not the world it could have been if we were nicer, more spiritual and less materialistic people.


Of course there used to be people like that right here in our country.

We killed them.

Not all of them, though. The ones who survived, we gave them casinos. Because the perfect gift for spiritual people who aren't materialistic is a casino.

Casinos and native Americans aside, it really wouldn't be that difficult to change the country fundamentally.

With all the progress we have made over the last 50 years or so, we've thrown out more than a few babies with the bathwater.

Remember this quote from Grantland Rice?

“For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes - not that you won or lost - but HOW you played the Game."

That sounds so quaint now you might think it was from the 18th or 19th century, but Rice -- one of the greatest sportswriters ever -- wrote those words in 1941.

It was a very different time, a time when sportsmanship mattered and how you won was almost as important as whether you won. Some of the stories that lasted were of athletes calling fouls on themselves or pointing mistakes referees had made and giving away victories in the process.

It was the 1960s when things started to change.

Remember?

The King

"Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

Or this?

"It isn't bragging if you can back it up."

And finally ...

"If you ain't cheating a little, you're not going to win very much."

Vince Lombardi, Muhammad Ali and Richard Petty are three of the biggest names in sports from the '50s through the '80s, and the quotes show a progression toward the world we have today.

A big part of it is money. Up through the '60s, in baseball for example, many players made so little money that they had to work at offseason jobs. That didn't make them any less competitive, but when salaries started climbing and climbing, things got weird.

Rose and Fosse

One of the first examples came in the 1970 All-Star Game, when Cincinnati's Pete Rose barreled into Cleveland's Ray Fosse to score a run in a game that meant nothing. Fosse was left with pain that never really went away, and Rose said he didn't regret a thing.

And because he made it all about winning, there were plenty of people who said Rose had done the right thing.

It certainly isn't just the world of sports, either. When Oliver Stone made his movie "Wall Street" in 1987, corporate raider Gordon Gekko became a national hero of sorts as a symbol of the Reagan Years.

What many people didn't seem to realize was that when Gekko said "Greed is good," he wasn't dispensing great wisdom. Gekko was the villain in the movie and Stone was trying to make a point about what was happening in high finance.

"This is not the world it could have been."

Was it ever? Could we go back 50 or 60 years to what was at least arguably a more moral society without depriving women, African-Americans or gays and lesbians of the progress they have fought so hard to gain?

We could try, but it isn't worth pushing people out the door just to make life more pleasant for the ruling class. When I was in high school in Virginia, I didn't attend truly integrated schools until 1966.

It's one thing to look at people of different races or ethnicities and see the difference. It's another thing entirely when you look at the difference and say it makes them inferior to you.

That's when we lose the world that could have been.

What can we do? We can accept the fact that it is a privilege to be alive, and a task worth tackling to make our world better than it is.

We don't make the world better by hating.

This has been one of those all-over-the-place posts, but I'll try and finish strong ...

There's a saying that if your only tool is a hammer, every job looks like a nail. And if you look for adversaries, everyone you see will seem threatening.

But if you look around and see neighbors, if you see folks who have the same problems as you and are looking for the same solutions, then there's hope.

More than a thousand years before the United States of America was founded, someone asked a great philosopher if there was one word that could serve as a principle for a good life. Confucius replied that the word was "reciprocity."

"Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."

That's as good a way as any to find a path to the world that still might be.