Presby-Musings

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series this week.   The fact that I was able to write that sentence is fairly unbelievable.  The last championship the Chicago Cubs won was in 1908.  They came close a couple of times over that 108 year stretch, but never won it all until this week.  I lived in Chicago long enough to become a Cubs fan.  I've sat in the stands at Wrigley Field on beautiful summer days with a Chicago hot dog in one hand and an Old Style beer in the other.  I have also suffered with Cubs fans every year since as the Cubs always seemed to find a way to let it all fall apart at the end of a season.  Perhaps there is no greater living Chicago Cubs fan than the actor Bill Murray.  Murray was invited into the Cubs locker room to celebrate with the team after they won Game 7 of the World Series.  "Dreams do come true," he told reporters with tears in his eyes.   He acknowledged that the Cubs had always been the "Lovable Los...

When I was a kid and played sports, the only people who got trophies were the people who actually won something. Now everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.  But despite the love-fest of indiscriminate trophy distribution at my children's awards ceremonies, everyone knows who the star on the team is.  Everyone knows which team beat all of the other teams for the entire season, even when the league officials fervently avoided keeping score.  We may all want everyone to get a trophy and feel good about themselves, but we know that not everyone deserves one.  We also know that life isn't fair, and that sometimes even when we work hard, play hard, try hard and want something hard... it doesn't always go our way.  I've noticed that the kids who tend to perform better than their peers at sports, scholastics, you name it, also tend to complain about the seeming lack of fairness inherent in the "Everyone's A Winner" approach. Because we all know that n...