Competition focuses, reaches, catches, traps, evolves, gives, takes, glorifies, laughs. Competition is a god.

Competition is like love. I don’t want to give it up! Like love, competition puts the fun in everything. Competition makes games. Games make fun. Fun makes community.

Think, Olympics without competition.

Imagine only one football team.

Games, all about not winning?

Business, drooping like some Communism.

Events, not planed to out-do the one before.

Competition is god. Sometimes though, we stand up to god. We can pick how we want to worship. We get to say what games we want to play. Vote with our feet.

The game where a few smart and amazingly talented people beat the rest of the world at the Monopoly is not fun. The point of a game is fun right? Fun on both sides. When the game is over, it stops. Or when we say it’s over, it stops. It’s a game. We made the rules, remember?

Play a new game.

Tug of war is no longer fun when it’s people against a machine. Maybe this game got dropped from the Olympics for good reason.

Give us bread lest we die.

It’s that old story. Growing up I always thought  the protagonists that the God in the Bible Stories helped were the good guys.

But Joseph Sold Into Egypt he was more like a Red Ocean dreamer of dreams. So, like Warren Buffet, he could tell what the economy was going to do. We get the story that his prognostication was fair and based on the weather.  Maybe so.  In that case, so is the economic climate: There was going to be an inflation then a drop. So he invested and bought up all the corn. Yeah, people ate nothing but corn.

Then when the Great Depression err famine came he did the usual.

The people spent all their money on food the first year of the seven-year famine, Great Depression.

Second and third years people traded their cattle for food.

Next years their land.

Then the clincher:  Give us bread else we die!

So, our righteous Joseph-Sold-into-Egypt accepted the lives of everyone in the kingdom in exchange for feeding them. Viola!

He was the king’s deputy. Kings are servants of their people. Not the other way around. They got their jobs backwards.

I don’t know if a God did or didn’t give him the heads up or the vision of patterns and the wisdom to save the world from starvation.  Enslaving everyone was not necessary, though. Or was it?  It was four hundred years later that, well surprise, Joseph’s own descendants are enslaved to the system that he started when he might have just served.

They wanted out of slavery and vicious miracles got them out in our Exodus  Bible story.

Key to being enslaved is both sides play the game.

Oh, so you want just you and the Pharaoh to be left alive then?

You lose us, you lose your kingdom. Ayn Rand glorifies this outcome.  In her popular novel Atlas Shrugged, just a Pharaoh and a Joseph and a mighty girl are left after they didn’t help the people. Try and get dumber than that.  No one else was worth it.  Some folks do seem to think that is a great story.  (Note: I was one of them. People change.)

“Give us liberty or give us death!”

It’s just an attitude, as opposed to:

“Give us bread else we die!”

People are more important than game rules. Rules and games are for people.  People matter.  Public servants are for people. Smart ones are great gifts to all of us. Smart people matter just as much as not-smart-in-that-way, people.

Joseph and Warren Buffet can serve and care and offer their gifts how their hearts desire.

We have hearts, too. We can dictate what we experience and believe by consciously making choices.

We don’t have to sacrifice liberty to live. We don’t have to kill anyone, or die.

My childhood hero Joseph Sold into Egypt no longer impresses me.

Re-living re-rewriting this same story now.

Heroes, step up.

 

In response to WordPress The Daily Post

Daily Prompt: Competition

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/daily-prompt-competition/