Little League Renaissance: Is Failure that Taboo?

When I was nine my mother forced me to play little league baseball. I was horrible. My team was horrible – and we lost almost every game… miserably.

Last year I went to a youth softball game and mistakenly made the comment that the scoreboard must be broken, as it was indicating the pitch count but no score. I was quickly corrected by a mother sitting next to me that they were not concerned with winners or losers and “the only thing that matters is that everyone is having fun.”

Really? While the concept itself made absolutely no sense to me at the time, it was too early on a Saturday morning to debate my ideological viewpoints with total strangers. I filed the experience away and haven’t thought about it since… until this morning.

Almost every news source today has some version of a story discussing how AIG has spent the government “bailout money”… including paying over $135 million in bonuses to “talented executives.”

I immediately thought of that mother at the softball game. In justifying the allocation of tax dollars toward employee bonuses, an AIG representative argued that these measures were necessary to “retain [their] talented employees.” Aren’t these “talented employees” the same that ran one of the nation’s largest corporations so close to bankruptcy they received over $173 billion? Additionally, did the government assume that a monetary band-aid would remedy this crisis – in affect trying to ensure that everybody wins… thinking deep down inside, “the only thing that matters is that everyone is having fun”?

Is there a connection with this thinking? Is the way we treat something as innocent as Little League baseball correlate with the way we accept consequence as a society? Is a culture that ignores the lessons learned in losing, evolving into a society that not only fears failure – but will go to tremendous limits to avoid it? Thoughts?