Battling for second

The big news around here today is the scandal at Claremont McKenna College, where a “newly former” administrator inflated student SAT scores so that the school would be higher in the rankings in places like U.S. News and World Report.   By inflating each score by only 10 or 20 points the school managed to end up at number 9 in the nation. The outcry is great.  We know that cheating and lying are wrong, and many editors in many papers have commented on the tragic irony of schools which have codes of honor for their students violate the very ethics those codes demand.

But the problem goes beyond that campus, and beyond the 91711 zip code and even beyond academia in its broadest sense.  For the effort to get a higher ranking seems to be a symptom of a culture that just can’t get beyond needing to always be #1, or at least ahead of as many people as possible.

And I have to say I get it.  I get it really well because I am competitive to a fault, and sometimes a big fault.  I always wanted to be the best.  I didn’t cheat to get there, but I certainly didn’t behave myself when I didn’t.  I was furious, and red faced and pouty when Miss Summers said Susan had the best penmanship in our fourth grade class. (that’s when we actually learned how to write cursively).  Sixth grade may have been my greatest year:  just because I couldn’t stand the idea of those twins winning the 50 yard dash I ran faster than ever before or ever since to be the speediest girl runner in the grade, and was darn close to Gordon who won the boys’ race.  Our teacher gave out stars for everything and so I sat straighter (posture star), read more (book star), had a bigger vocabulary (word star) than anyone else and managed a certain (and I am sure annoying) smugness for most of that school year.

I get wanting to be number 1.  I also get what it feels like to be number 2, having lost more sermon competitions than probably any other minister in our National Association (I have since stopped entering).   And watching my son begin to get responses to his law school applications, and hearing him tell me exactly what the ranking of any school is and where he hopes to go, I  realize that he has inherited some of that competitiveness.  Not necessarily a good thing

Because truth to tell, in the end, and in the final analysis, it probably doesn’t matter whether you edge out number 10 to become number nine, or whether you have the second best penmanship or even the second worst penmanship.  The other side of the story is the side we often forget.  As often as not  the one who was first in his law school class at the number one school who entered the very best firm and now makes the most money of any new graduate, works 24/7, doesn’t have time to spend his money and hates his job.

Better to be like the rest of us, whether we are content or not:  pursuing something we are passionate about, or doing something that lets us pursue something we are passionate about.  Because for that “rest of us”, which is actually the most of us, what we do makes a difference. Nothing could matter more than  helping a 2^nd grader read a story,  sharing a sandwich with the homeless man who camps on the church steps, reading a poem that makes us weep, seeing a picture that makes us gasp, hearing a song that touches our soul or holding the hand of a friend whose heart is breaking.

For after all, some One we love, who loves us no matter what, has said  that the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.   And all God’s people said “Amen!”