COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
NEW GAMES - With the global emphasis on winning, beating your opponents, demolishing the competition --- maybe it's time to rethink the whole notion of sport. Ten people run a footrace. One is celebrated as a "champion"; what happens to the losers? A hundred girls are paraded in a beauty contest; 99 are defeated, rejected, shoved aside. Five billion people want to live; a handful triumph over the rest --- aristocrats and serfs, kalifs and servants, commanders and conquests.
Whether it's golf or commerce, dating or politics, competition implies a small number of winners and a vast slagheap of losers. If your purpose is to "win" in the traditional sense, odds are you're going to lose, no matter how mightily or cleverly you play the game.
I'm not thinking of the meek, who never rise to the challenge, who end up in the back row with their heads bowed, subsisting on crumbs and begging for forgiveness. I'm thinking of you and me --- average guys in the middle of the pack, joining a footrace already in progress, with Al Gore and Ted Turner way out in front. This is the situation most people are in. You have two arms, two legs, a second-class brain and a burning desire to succeed. If you were born in America, the struggle for survival is a solved problem. If you were born in Western Europe, the struggle for survival has been temporarily postponed by a feat of public finance prestidigitation. Five or six years from now, who knows? --- but it's a cinch you won't have to face the horrors of homelessness in Sao Paulo or medical care in Kinshasa. The fact that you're surfing the Web speaks volumes. Your physical survival is not in jeopardy, sonny. You're in the running, and the question is purely an issue of greed.
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Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Pamela Anderson is your dream date. Right away, you're in trouble. She's an airhead. Even if you win this babe, all you've won is an illusion, with plenty of Rodeo Drive shopping, nonstop gossip, and an overdose of Scoobie-Doo reruns, instead of real romance. The same applies to religion. If you pray five times a day, you don't transcend your humanity --- you stupefy and contradict whatever brain you were born with. I don't care if the Pope gives medals for piety, or if Allah promised immortality. Buyer beware.
So that greed means something more than fame and fortune. It means, at a minimum, making choices that make sense. Of these, I regard two as worthy beyond measure: your integrity and ambition. Integrity means being truthful, thoughtful, courageous, mentally independent and morally self-propelled, no matter what your parents or neighbors tell you to do. Ambition means forging a new path, not one that some shark explained on late-night TV and only costs $49.95 to get started today. The world offers plenty of tradition: trinkets and warfare, fashion and fantasies. None of it is worth a second look. The one and only goal is a purposeful adventure, wandering off in your own direction, taking nothing from the rest of us except the sweep of history: a collective disaster that wrecked more lives than it glorified, with maybe five or six innovators who refused to "compete." They didn't chase after dumb blondes with big tits; they didn't make a killing on Wall Street; they followed no one and questioned everything.
The real competition is between you and you --- the part that wants to play it safe, and the part that is capable of honor. Somewhere on this planet, there's a woman who will change your life because she's an equal in spirit. If you play it safe, you'll never find her. All the money in the world won't win her. The blood of a thousand peasants on your sword won't help you live together in harmony.
RDR RECOMMENDED SITE OF THE DAY: IF you're into visiting the sites of bonafide crackpots, you are gonnah love FixedEarth. Take a look.
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