PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS

I've been thinking a lot lately about fairness.  I suppose it comes to my mind because of the controversy surrounding the Chinese women's (or maybe it should be girl's!) gymnastics team.  Fairness, or more correctly, the lack of fairness, has always been a pet-peeve of mine.  Even the small unfair things in life tend to bother me.  You know the things that I mean.  The person in the express line with 35 items pretending that they don't know the limit is 12, the guy who steals the parking spot that you've so patiently been waiting for, or the blow-hard at work who cavalierly takes credit for ideas that you both know were yours.  I know that in the scheme of things this stuff isn't really important.  I guess what bothers me the most about people like this, is the arrogance that it takes to believe that other peoples time, ideas or efforts are just not as important as their own.  The more that we accept these little injustices, I think the more numb we become to the really big ones involving politics, social and global justice.  

If the allegations should turn out to be true, isn't this arrogance what's at the root of the falsification of some of the Chinese athletes birth records or the use of performance enhancing drugs in the Tour de France, Major League Baseball or any number of other professional sports?  The idea that we deserve to win at any cost, even if the other competitors worked harder, had more natural ability or just happened to be better on that particular day, seems to be a more common one than any of us would care to admit.  I know of course, that life isn't always fair, but I think fairness is definitely something to aspire to in each of our short stays on the planet.  Play nice!