University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) vs. University of Southern California (USC) Tonight – Hurray for Whomever

I happened to meet a wonderful couple earlier this afternoon at a restaurant that featured the UCLA/USC game on a television screen.  When, during a pause in our conversation, the wife caught me glancing upward and asked me whom I favored, I stumbled for a moment, and told her, “Oh, I suppose I’m inclined to root for UCLA, since they host a terrific conference several times a year on corporate sustainability, and I’m always invited to participate. Also, one of my best friend’s eldest daughter goes to UCLA.”

Though I didn’t want to go on about a subject that she had brought up simply to relieve us of an awkward silence, I continued:  “But I have to say that I became a bit turned off to the whole thing, when my friend’s daughter told me about her indoctrination, where each incoming freshman is taught, quite seriously, to hate the kids from USC, and to regard them as enemies.  Apparently, this whole experience isn’t a minor footnote in the college experience; it’s a matter of intense importance for new students that they are expected to carry with them the rest of their lives.  When she understood the severity of what was going on, she explained to her ‘handlers’ that she regarded this whole process as overtly stupid and not worthy of intelligent people, but they assured her that she would be ostracized in a big way if she were to underestimate the gravity of the situation — or worse — make her viewpoints public.”

Needless to say, I sympathize with this 19-year-old kid.  This is a gross form of stupidity indeed; it’s the very last thing that anyone of compassion would want to teach our most capable young people – that certain others, simply because they happened to choose a different college, are morally or intellectually inferior, or should be regarded in any way an “enemy.”

If humankind has a chance to survive the challenges that face us, it will be because we somehow find a way to stop promoting hatred just for the sport of it, based on our chance differences, and begin to call attention to our many similarities and common needs.

As my own daughter likes to say when she sees something that she deems embarrassingly dumb, “Really???”