We live in a highly competitive world. We see ourselves and others through a lens defined by competition. And depending on whose side we stand, we are perceived either as allies or as enemies, as collaborators or competitors. Even as we speak here today of heroism, we speak within a platform of competition. Competition can be good. No less than the prominent educator, Carolyn Woo once said, “There is a place for competition in our growth. We develop self-discipline. There’s a sense of training, of setting a goal, of working hard toward that goal, and, yes, along the way, we do learn something.”
In our economy, competition is a good thing because, without competition, we would have a monopoly and fewer choices. But the problem is that we have internalized competitive behavior, whether it is necessary or not necessary. Even when we win, we’re always afraid of being replaced at the top. Our self-worth has become dependent on things that are external. We hear our parents asking, did you get an award? Did you do better than somebody else? How can we really look at other people in their own rights and celebrate who they are and who we are if each time we find that something great happens to somebody else, we feel smaller?
Today’s real problems have root causes far greater than ourselves that cannot be solved by us competing against each other. They can only be solved by all of us working together. That sense that we’re in this together, and that we are mutually dependent. The world today can no longer be saved by individual heroes. It can only be rebuilt by heroic communities, people empowering and working with other people. And those heroes are all of us. People who will think outside the box of competition and thinking out of that box are willing to put our minds, our hearts and our lives together for the shared responsibility of breaking the oppressive mold of individualist thinking, hopelessness and negativity that permeate the world today and break us apart. We need those people who believe we’re on this Earth and in in this country together, not by chance, but by design, and that our stories of heroism are never separate but are truly intertwined. Let us be those people that the world needs today. Let us be those heroes.