A Special Message

I recently read this piece about how NFL football player Brian Holloway responded to vandalism of the home he has for sale by inviting the teenagers who vandalized the home to have a picnic and repair the damage that they had done.  I found the story compelling, and I saw value in the sentiments expressed, but then I got to this line:   “Instead of teaching your kids to work hard and earn things, you give a trophy to every kid in youth sports.”

That statement is another in a long line of jeremiads about the “problem” of teaching each child that he or she is special – the same kind of jeremiad expressed in another piece that made its way around Facebook recently, which suggests that the source of unhappiness for folks in Generation Y (a.k.a., the Millennial generation, consisting of folks born from around 1980 to the mid-1990s) is that they’ve all been told they’re special growing up, only to grow up and find out that they’re not.  Indeed, part of the author’s advice for finding happiness juxtaposes the “You’re not special” sentiment with the same value of hard work expressed in the piece I reference above.  The author states, “Stop thinking that you're special.  The fact is, right now, you're not special.  You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet.  You can become special by working really hard for a long time.”

I guess to an extent I understand this sentiment, but I also think the sentiment and the corresponding advice are misguided.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling folks that everyone is special and, as a component of that, telling each individual that he or she is special.  Indeed, democracy itself relies on acknowledging the particular contributions that each person can offer, valuing each of those contributions and providing both for the expression of those contributions and for the process of listening to those contributions.  In this regard, I rest on the fifth word of the definition of the word “special” that the second piece offers:  “better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.”  Each of us is different from one another, based on differences in cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, and more.  A working democracy recognizes those differences, calling upon each of us both to contribute our own perspectives and what we have to offer and to recognize the contributions of others.

So, I don’t think telling people they’re not special is the answer.  To do so suggests that folks don’t have contributions to offer.  Furthermore, when combined with the sentiment that one needs to work hard to make oneself special or to prove that one is special, it becomes a way of reinforcing the unearned privileges of those whose positions the structure of society has advantaged.  Indeed, this correlates with the kinds of sentiments that people of color, women, working-class individuals, the differently abled, and so on have had to deal with historically, wherein they have been told they just aren’t working hard enough to earn consideration, while white folks, men, the rich, those whose abilities serve as the basis for the structure of society, and so on have faced less laborious paths to the kind of “special” status that provides a basis for consideration of their contributions.  Indeed, this is why multiculturalism is so important in connection with democracy.  It asks us not only to allow, but to celebrate the diversity of cultures, peoples, and perspectives that all might contribute to the governance and richness of society.

I think the answer, rather, is that while we’ve found ways to tell people they’re special, we have not done a good job of including the other side of the “Everyone is special” message—namely, that everyone else is special, too.  In other words, each of us should be told that we are special because we are—we each have something to contribute, and we should contribute it—but in doing so, we must also take care to remember to accept, consider, and celebrate the contributions of each of our fellow members of society.  And, in doing so, we must seek to understand, empathize, and respect others even as we do that for ourselves.  It’s the kind of thing that many colleagues and I teach about in communication courses:  For as much as expression is a fundamental part of communication, listening remains half of the process as well, and to be good communicators (and, by extension, I would suggest good citizens) we must work not only on expressing ourselves well, but also on listening well to others.

Yet, in a society such as the United States, we have the economic imperatives of a capitalist system that teach a competitive rather than cooperative ethic, thereby creating “winners” and “losers” by which to declare some folks special and others not special.  Meanwhile, we also have the political imperatives of a republic that ask us to judge individuals as more or less representative of classes of groups and the concomitant overgeneralizations about those groups, thereby promoting a society based on demography and not democracy.  These imperatives provide means for teaching the message that a person is special, but they struggle with providing the means for teaching the corollary message that everyone else is special, too.  And, so, when we start to see problems with the “You’re special” side of the message, we turn the wrong way, toward “You’re not special,” rather than toward the much more hopeful and affirming message of “And don’t forget that everyone else is special, too.”

How about this time we eschew the discouraging message of the former path and instead give that more encouraging latter path a better try?