Gather 'Round. It's Quote Readin' Time!
I stumbled upon this quotation a few days ago.
"Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other." -Erma Bombeck
That just doesn't make any sense. This quotation is indicative of another, more serious problem. We tend to glorify someone who has been involuntarily shoved into terrible tragedies by making ordinary "successes" into great triumphs. This, my friends, is sooo wrong. Sorry, Erma, but you're an idiot dressed up in a genius' clothing. Let's look at this from an example, shall we? Let's say I'm playing a game of checkers, only I'm starting out with half of my pieces missing already, while my opponent starts out with a full set of pieces. We play, and sure enough, I lose after having taken only three of his pieces. Would you call the game a success for me? Absolutely not. Why, then, would you call Helen Keller a success? (Now don't get all pissy at me. I'm not saying she was a failure, either. In America, we don't have just the two options. There are tens of millions of people who don't fall into either of those two categories. I'm one of them, for the time being, and so was Helen Keller.) A great success is simply acheiving a great goal that has been set. That's it. Madonna IS successful. So is anyone who's ever been elected President of the United States, won a Nobel Prize, or allowed a man who killed both his wife and an innocent bystander to go free. Helen Keller was able to come as close to living an absolutely perfectly normally life as is possible for a blind and deaf person in today's world, but that's not an "accomplishment." Putting men on the moon is an accomplishment.
Still don't believe me? Well, Helen does and even agrees with me. These are her own words: "The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself so that he can win light through work."
"Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other." -Erma Bombeck
That just doesn't make any sense. This quotation is indicative of another, more serious problem. We tend to glorify someone who has been involuntarily shoved into terrible tragedies by making ordinary "successes" into great triumphs. This, my friends, is sooo wrong. Sorry, Erma, but you're an idiot dressed up in a genius' clothing. Let's look at this from an example, shall we? Let's say I'm playing a game of checkers, only I'm starting out with half of my pieces missing already, while my opponent starts out with a full set of pieces. We play, and sure enough, I lose after having taken only three of his pieces. Would you call the game a success for me? Absolutely not. Why, then, would you call Helen Keller a success? (Now don't get all pissy at me. I'm not saying she was a failure, either. In America, we don't have just the two options. There are tens of millions of people who don't fall into either of those two categories. I'm one of them, for the time being, and so was Helen Keller.) A great success is simply acheiving a great goal that has been set. That's it. Madonna IS successful. So is anyone who's ever been elected President of the United States, won a Nobel Prize, or allowed a man who killed both his wife and an innocent bystander to go free. Helen Keller was able to come as close to living an absolutely perfectly normally life as is possible for a blind and deaf person in today's world, but that's not an "accomplishment." Putting men on the moon is an accomplishment.
Still don't believe me? Well, Helen does and even agrees with me. These are her own words: "The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself so that he can win light through work."
posted by Vaughan at
12:52 PM
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