This image really strikes home when you read the title: This is my little brother’s friend pinning a ribbon on him, after finding out my brother didn’t win any ribbons at the school’s track meet. Yes, I found this on Reddit. Yes, there is another lesson here.
We’ve all been taught that competition shows who will be the winners and who will be the losers. But do we even realize that we are the ones who create the winners AND the losers? What if we gave everyone the same chance? What if there were no favorites? What if we saw the depth within us all? What if we all gave a ribbon to someone, and then got a ribbon from someone else, and that trend kept going on around the world? What if we all encouraged the differences instead of the similarities? What is there was no list of acceptable and not? What if we all were allowed to be who we were born to be, with no barriers to crawl over?
Well, we’d all be winners. And maybe we wouldn’t allow laws that suppressed and condemned to come into being. And people who transgressed on another’s soul wouldn’t be allowed into places of power. And crimes would not see the light of day because everyone would have a single positive moment to lift them up from the darkness. And bullies would no longer try to hurt the weak because they wouldn’t learn how to be bullies in the first place.
Just think, a positive world could be reached – all because every one of us got a ribbon for something that we’re good at: being ourselves. It’s something we should think about.
