I hate "reality" game shows

Above all two things make today's "reality shows" despicable for me: they create far more losers than winners and they enforce the belief that a slim majority of by-standers' votes means everything - as if life were no more than a rigged lottery or popularity contest. Thankfully life isn't like that.

As a debater, I can list a dozen more points pro and con. I don't even fault those who enjoy the spectacle, the guilty pleasures of seeing people lose and be brought down and the momentary vicarious joy they share with a winner. These at least reinforce the idea that someone can win at least some of the time. Unfortunately, though, they show winning as mostly luck among relatively equal players. We need every type of person who contributes, every set of skills no matter how few those skills may serve. In my view, every contestant is about equally justifiable as a winner, a person who is putting themselves out there to achieve, to contribute and offer their effort.

Game shows, which is what these are, have always been with us and always will be, right from gladiatorial times and their earlier versions. At least the many losers today get to go home. They provide a pleasant distraction for many people some of the time. Daily news provides worse "entertainment." We learn from defeat. Can we not learn even more from success?

Who is singing the praises of cooperative success, of the societies we can build on working together to see that everyone wins? Fortunately there's some emphasis today on such things as successful business ventures, home renovations and other constructive projects and what makes them so - people working together for good ends. We even get a bit of information now and again about the tremendous success in less developed areas of micro-investing, where extremely small loans enable creative local people to build thriving businesses, repay the loans and get their footing firmly established to advance their families and communities.

Of course competition is healthy. It motivates us more than some like to admit and for good reason. Being the best, however, does not mean everyone else must experience defeat. My beef with a steady diet of winners versus losers is that there's more important stuff in life. An exaggerated emphasis on winning over others, on who's kicked off the show, rather than on how they helped each other along the way to different levels of success makes it seem as if in our daily lives we should concentrate on destroying others chances to ensure our own. It's fine that some people win bigger than others. It's a fact of human psychology that an element of chance stimulates human interest more than any single addictive force we know. My concern is with the culture of losing as the only alternative that seems to be emphasized to an appalling degree. In the end, for me, there's just too much of it by far.