That's what it all comes down to in politics, religion, sports, isn't it? Are you playing for yourself? Or for the team?
In sports I've found a new hero, John Goncalves of North Portland who coached his Junior Baseball team to the 9- 10 year-old state championship. Quite a feat for this real life version of the Bad News Bears, some of whom could barely throw or catch a baseball before the season began. Perhaps this is a harbinger of the revival of Roosevelt High baseball.
It ranks right up there with Roosevelt's runner-up finish in the Class 5A basketball championship last March. That team was coached by my son's former JV coach at Cleveland, Robert Key. Key is a good coach and a good person. He's a team man all the way, in the best sense of the word.
As I said, that's what life as we live it comes down to, in an ethical and moral sense. You're either a team person or you're in it for yourself. Take for example the simmering and divisive issue of school choice. Two of my recent posts have elicited a record (for this site) number of comments on the effect of choice and school transfers on lower class, racially diverse neighborhood schools.
Steve Rawley on his blog provides evidence that the district transfer policy tends to exacerbate school racial segregation. Earlier studies have also shown that transfers leave already poor schools with an even greater percentage of poor students, regardless of race. So in effect, parents who choose "better" schools for their children are arguably doing harm to the children of other parents who, for whatever reason, "choose" to stay behind in their neighborhood schools.
In a comment to my post on charter high schools, Rawley points out that, in the scramble to do well by their own children, people tend to "forget about the common good." I agree. In fact, the political divide in this country falls squarely between those who believe we should provide for the common welfare and those who believe in individual responsibility. The "individualists" are currently in the ascendance, and perhaps always have been, which is why we have no European style universal health care and why the schools are under increasing pressure to privatize.
Religious ascetics, Catholic monastics, for example, take vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity for good reason --to serve the greater good. The last vow, celibacy, enables the devotee to avoid the trap of particular, or exclusive, love*, say for a wife or a child or brother. That frees him to embrace a greater, more universal love for all people regardless of family, tribe, clan, or ethnic connection.
Am I recommending that we all become monks and forsake our families? Hardly. But the ethics --the morality-- of providing for the common welfare should not be ignored. Even the most irreligious and agnostic among us should be forced to answer the question asked of Jesus, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
My answer to that, in the Jesus sense of brotherhood, is --yes, I am.
* (love, not lust)
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