Anyone who has read The Pride of Central or who has followed this blog knows that I like to use baseball as an allegory for many things.
I've written blog posts on how being published is an accomplishment akin to breaking into professional baseball and about how being a last-place team or writer does not make someone bad at what they do. And The Pride of Central makes baseball symbolic of many aspects of the human condition.
But not every allegory works. There are ways in which writing and life are not like baseball.
In baseball, there has to be a loser. The rules require it. The game is not supposed to end in a tie. In order for one team to win, the other must lose. On a grander scale, for one team to win the World Series, the other twenty-nine must be defeated.
This is fine for sports. It is essentially how elections work as well. In some areas of life, one person winning and one person losing is the way of it, whether we like it or not.
But in society at large, and on social media in particular, I am seeing a trend towards treating some areas of our lives as a winner-takes-all venture when there need not be winners or losers at all. In some endeavors, we are not teams trying to defeat each other, but rather a fleet trying to safely get everyone from one shore to another. If one baseball team beats another, it means little in the larger scheme of life. But if a ship sinks another, tragedy occurs. Rather than sinking someone else's vessel, we should be helping each boat get to the other side.
And the more water there is in the ocean, the more each boat rises.
I could write about many places where this is the case, but I am going to focus on two areas that are important to me. First, about selling your book.
Sometimes, authors who have been blessed to be published find themselves competing with other authors. Maybe the fantasy writer envies the sales of a romance writer. Or maybe one mystery writer has developed envy for another mystery writer. Whether the animosity is for someone within the same genre or for a completely different type of writer, the rivalry is silly. There is no winner or loser here. All authors should share their stories. One writer successfully sharing their story does not deprive me of sharing mine. Readers buy more than one book. They take more than one book out of the library. They download more than one book on their Kindle. No matter how many copies the "other guy" sells, you can still sell yours.
But, more than that, the "other guy" selling his book is actually a good sign for you. It means there are still readers out there. The "other guy" may be getting someone into reading, or distracting someone from their iPad or television. When anyone sells a book, it actually increases everyone's chances of being read. Reading breeds readers. We all can get to the other shore - getting our stories into the hands of readers - if we support each other's efforts instead of making sales into competitions.
Originally, I was going to end this blog post here. But in the past week, my social media feed has started to fill up with a lot of nasty posts and comments pertaining to something else, and I feel much of it goes back to this same concept. People are seeing a competition in a place where there should be a unified effort.
Education.
School is starting in Pennsylvania right now. There have been many pictures of children's first day of school, and they have been very cute. But I am also seeing the snide comments, the nasty memes, the critical posts: the way we educate is the right way, and anyone else is doing it the wrong way. Oh, no post has used those words, but that's what many of them meant. In the last week, I've seen people or organizations from each kind of schooling - public, private, cyber and home - put something out there that essentially said "my team is better than yours." It's not everyone, of course. I hope it is the small, vocal minority who see it as a competition. But it has been enough to boil the blood.
I also know parents who homeschool, who cyber school, who send their children to public schools and who send their children to private schools. And you know what? They are all amazing parents, and they all have amazing children. They are doing what is best for their children and their families. It is not one size fits all. In addition, I know many families that started in one form of education and switched to another along the way. They, too, are doing their best for their children.
We should not be trying to win some education battle. We should be supporting each other in whatever educational path we all have chosen. Because water makes all the boats rise. When public schools succeed, we all succeed, even if your children don't go to public school. When homeschoolers succeed, we all succeed, even if your children aren't homeschooled. Private school, cyber school...we all need all these systems to succeed. The goal should not be to prove our way is better, but to have everyone educated in the way that is best for them. Then we can get to the other shore - raising both individuals and an entire generation to reach its full potential.
Next week: Taking a break for Labor Day
Two weeks from now: Could it happen again?