"Good" Team Play

What sort of moral compass allows us to condemn actions by one administration only to be silent (complicit?) when our own candidate commits them?
~ from Time to Reset Our Moral Compass by Norman Mathews ~

I only chose to highlight this one sentence from Mathew's superb essay (I hope you follow the link to read the whole article) because it refers to an issue that is seldom discussed: team play.

In so many ways, politics isn't all that different than sports. In the athletic arena, we have teams. Their counterpart in politics is the political party. (On the more intimate level, your family is viewed as a team too.) We're taught from an early age publicly not to badmouth the team or its members. Behind closed doors, you can get in someone's grill or knock them upside the head, but in public, we're taught to wear a shit eating grin.

For you sports fans, we all know the drill. A player on one team fumbles the ball in the last minute, misses the key free throw or strikes out on a pitch in the dirt. After the big loss, the team's coach and various star players are interviewed. Everyone says that the loss wasn't due to this one grievous foul-up -- even though everyone KNOWS it was -- and what a great guy or gal their teammate is. He/She has 100% of our support, we're told, even though most of us are really darn sure he/she is being berated by teammates in the locker room.

This same scenario plays out in politics too. While there are Republican representatives irate with Speaker of the House John Boehner's inability to lead and Democratic representatives fuming over President Obama's bend-over-backwards strategy of accommodating almost every Republican whim, neither side seems willing to take their guy to task. Our elected leaders refuse to speak their minds candidly because you just can't openly criticize the players on your "team."

As many pundits have pointed out, politicians have become so possessive of the team name and brand that they are willing to create train wreck after train wreck as if all they are doing is playing a game of Risk. Under this mentality, it is far better for your team to win or hold the line than to allow the opposing team to win OR to draw up a compromise with them.

If we look at most of the world's well-known religious and philosophical figures, one interesting aspect they share in common is that they placed the whole of humanity and the world before team. Jesus was a revolutionary for his time and, unlike many of his compatriots, advocated nonviolence instead of violence. Siddhārtha Gautama renounced his world of privilege and went out to live among the people. Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching before disappearing into the mountains and Chuang Tzu turned down an invitation to a royal court.

All four were individuals who told it like they saw it and didn't hold anything back because it might not look for good for the team. In their own writings or writings about them, they criticized their compatriots as much as outside sources. They did this because they possessed strong moral compasses -- ones that were not corrupted by the false sentimentality for their brand.

That's what we need today, both in the public and private sphere. We need people who tell it like they see it, people with inner conviction and courage who are unafraid of criticizing their own team when that team is way off the mark.