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A Game of Scrabble

Years ago, before I stumbled into the foundation business, I spent some time tutoring troubled adolescents on Cape Cod.

One of my students was a 14-year-old girl who was coming off an abortion, an inpatient drug therapy program and school suspension. She read at the second grade level.

During our first session in her parents' posh oceanfront home, we played a game of Scrabble to break the ice. Soon her real estate tycoon father came home. After making sure I appreciated how much special tutors were costing him, he took notice of his daughter and what we were doing.

"Oh, Scrabble," he sneered. "I beat her at that all the time."

I remember that scene when I read yet another proposal describing how we need to save the family, set up more recreational programs, instill values and character building in schools, hire more tutors and therapists, or volunteer more. This is all well and good, even noble, but it doesn't begin to touch the cancer that was eating at that young girl's heart then, and eats at the heart of our materialistic culture today.

It's our obsession with competition and winning, pure and simple. This girl didn't want to compete with her father. She wanted his love, his encouragement, but he didn't know how to give it. All he understood was winning and losing, and being on the right side of that equation.

Don't get me wrong. Competition is part of the natural order of things. We inevitably compete with others in the process of fashioning a life, and we need to be good at it. But, as even a billionaire capitalist like George Soros points out, it is one thing to build a strong economy on the marketplace values associated with free and unfettered competition, and quite another to think those same values can sustain human culture.

What sustains a culture worth perpetuating is a seamless web of reciprocity, compassion and concern for others. This has been expressed for so long by so many of the world's great thinkers and religions that you think we would start to pay attention to it.

Instead, we have built a glossy edifice of spiraling economic growth and development that, for an increasing number of citizens, is hollow at its core. That's because it equates personal identity and self-fulfillment with consumption. The more consumption, the more economic transactions; the more transactions, the faster the rate of economic growth. The more growth, the higher our standard of living. The higher our standard of living, the more we are able to consume.

No wonder young people are so cynical. They see right through this charade. Dad travels for weeks on end so he can pay for family "quality time" in Vail. Mom works not only for additional income but also for the self-fulfillment and social validation that the market tells her is possible only through professional employment. Children, if they're lucky, get day care, lessons, other hired help and Tickle Me Elmo. If they're not lucky, they are simply ignored by adults, with the usual predictable consequences.

It is no coincidence that Arizona is near the top of the heap when it comes to personal consumption and economic growth, and near the bottom when it comes to indicators of child welfare. Ironically, many of our political, community and professional leaders extol the virtues of economic development and getting students ready to "compete in the global economy," and then starve investments in local community infrastructure and support services for children and families that make that competition possible in the first place.

Culture trumps strategy every time. So long as we continue to perpetuate a culture of competition and consumption devoid of a genuine concern for, and commitment to, the welfare of others, Arizona will never be a winner, no matter how we choose to keep score.

I wonder what happened to that troubled young girl I tutored some 36 years ago. She would be 50 today. Maybe she has a family of her own. Whether she wins or loses, I hope she still likes to play the game.

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*The Drift reflects the views of the author, and does not represent the official view of SLHI's Board of Trustees and staff.