My Cousin is Better Than Yours

I knew it was coming.

Standing in a concession line at a football game recently, I had the fortune (or misfortune?) of standing behind a young woman and a young boy fighting.

It wasn't really a mean fight. But I could see it all unfold as it actually did.

The young woman, maybe twenty'ish, was talking with a young boy, maybe seven, directly in front of her. The boy was telling her about a cousin of his who plays professional sports. Generally agreed-upon social structures say that you should tell the boy how nice that is and move on. You don't try to one-up a seven year-old.

But I could tell that this young woman doesn't abide by the social cues lots of people do. She told him about a relative or friend of hers who also plays professional ball, to which, naturally, the young boy told her about someone else he knows who plays ball.

About the only thing you should really do at that point is tell the boy how neat of a thing that is and MOVE ON.

But she didn't. She told him about someone else she knew that did something or played something or was somehow superior to the person that the boy just told her about.

You know what happened next. I don't blame the boy a bit for it, either.

He simply looked at her and said, "Yeah, well my cousin is better than yours."

You can see it coming with seven year-olds. It's not so easy or so natural to so see it coming with twenty-seven, or thirty-seven, or forty-seven year olds. That's why it probably catches us off-guard.

But we all do it just the same. We try to one-up each other. Whether it's reveling and taking joy in other people's misfortunes, scrambling to get in front of the jerk in traffic who just cut us off, or comparing our children's Little League performances or teams, we know how to one-up each other.

Part of the reason we do this is that it's human nature. The story of Cain and Abel gives us clues towards this end. Cain tried to one-up his brother and the offering he made to God. The story of God and the story of God's people in the beginning of the Bible is the story of us. We try to one-up each other because it's in our DNA, it's who we are.

But that doesn't mean it's okay. It's not okay to one-up seven year-olds and it's not okay to one-up seventeen year-olds and it's not okay to one-up fifty-seven year olds.

It doesn't do us or them any good.