This isn’t a call to try new things. I think we try new things every day. Perhaps the most terrifying(?) place to be in our culture today is mediocre at something. You either have to be great or to never do at all. People are impatient with mediocre. When I was in high school I liked to sing. I still like to sing. You can often find me singing something I’ve heard on the radio. After driving to work and I have a song stuck in my head. “Who sang that?” So and So. “Let’s keep it that way.” Our culture doesn’t tolerate the mediocre. If you’re not the best then please step aside for someone else. Look at American Idol. You either have to be the best or an epic failure to make it on that show. The mediocre just never seem to get anywhere. But all of us are mediocre at many different things that we absolutely love to do. We put our best time and skills together to be great but our best will only rise to the level of medicoracy. Perhaps its just context. You might be the best in your family, among your friends in your school but take it to the wider world and often what your thought was great just isn’t good enough. With the rise of mass media in the twentieth century our world has become a bigger place. It used to be that the villiage, town or neigborhood in which you lived was all that really mattered. Everyone sang. Everyone had a talent that they contributed to their community. Everyone played the piano for instance at the turn from the nineteenth to the twientieth century. But with the rise of mass media more players were added to the pool and people found themselves competing personally with some truly amazing talent. What’s you song compared to another. What’s your story compared to another. As people began to gravitate to these more professional people’s music than they became less and less patient with those who couldn’t compare. The local musician who was certainly talented and gifted among the people he knew couldn’t match the talent of someone three thousand miles away. And he or she lost out. As the world has gotten bigger more and more people have lost out to the competition. I find it funny that people who hate Wallmart because he replaces mom and pop shops say little about the professional pursuit of sports and music which tears down the foundations of people’s image and self worth (perhaps they do I just don’t know). Eat your bread and stay silent while other people reap the rewards. But the human heart is bursting with creativity and so much creativtity is being waisted by the imposition of the mass media. Bigger and bigger schools only add to the feeling of being a cog in a giant machine that doesn’t care about the creativity that bursting within you. Buy local. I’m a fan of the by local market because it allows others to do what they love with creativity and energy. There’s something that needs to be said about the transition from amature to professional sports in the early twentieth century – aptly demonstrated in the movie Chariots of Fire. Look at how the pursuit of the peak of human peformance is twisting people. Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong have altered there bodies and cheated the sport to find themselves in a place.
Dare to be Mediocre
