Win or Lose

It is one of the most chilling moments in the Academy award-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers. An Israeli security official is talking with a Palestinian doctor, who surprises him by saying, "We're winning." How can you think that, the Israeli asks. Your fighting forces are being wiped out, your people are being pushed farther and farther into a corner. We're winning, the doctor asserted, because we're causing so much pain and suffering for you!
That has become a more and more common attitude toward differences and contention. The goal has become not to acheive one's goals and dreams but to stymie one's opponents from reaching theirs! In other words, the battle becomes an end in itself where winning or losing are not merely out of reach, but not relevant at all.
So we have national elected officials who spend as much time preventing anything from happening as they do actually doing what obviously needs to be done. The goal would seem to be to cause as much pain and suffering as possible for the other guy.
And we have relationships where no one seems to want anyone else to achieve anything. Husbands stand in the way of wives going to work or for further education, even though they need the income and there is nothing to be done at home. Or, in a warped sort of caring, some parents encourage their children not to go for higher education, not to move on in a personal life, under the pretense of protecting them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Such scenarios result in an on-going tug of war without any discernable reason or goal.
This modern-day version of the Red Queen's Race (see Lewis Carroll's Through  the Looking Glass) results in running as fast as possible while staying in the same place: frustration, despair, confusion. Oh, but our very resistance to anything productive enables us to continue our stance as helpless victims and to avoid risking responsibility.
I have never been a fan of our society's idealization of competition. If anything, studies have shown it as one of the least productive ways of interacting. But what we have now is nowhere near the old capitalistic ideal of winning and losing.
When we regain that sense of directions, goals worth working toward, then we can get past this societal gridlock where the struggle is all.