An example of such a person would be a passenger in a car that broke down at 3 AM on the New Jersey Turnpike in the dead of winter. For argument's sake, we'll set this in a time when regular people did not have cell phones. This bubbly person would bounce out of the car and shout:
"Come on, let's walk to the nearest gas station! Isn't this exciting? It's New Jersey, it's 3 AM, and we're roughing it. Let's go!"
Clearly, this is an annoying person; here, the power of positive thinking is making the others want to hit her. But as with most things in life, there are two sides to everything, and there is a power of negative thinking as well. Of negative speaking, in fact.
Simply and crudely put, if you say something enough times, it becomes true; so if you constantly say you suck, well then, you're going to suck because everybody is going to think that you suck. Shakespeare said it best in Hamlet: ..."There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Now, there are certain things in life you can objectively say are either good or bad. Air conditioning - Good. Slave labor - Bad. But for the vast majority of areas in life about which there can be a variety of opinions, the words we use play a greater role in shaping those opinions than we think. Sticking with the theatre track, a group of young actors might be putting on a play that has the potential to be quite good, but the actors insecurities are compelling them to bash it or minimize the guest list or subconsciously sabotage it, and so in the unofficial history of theatre, the play will go down as a failure even though there was nothing inherently wrong with the play.
In the world of sports, we see this too. Sports talk radio (especially in New York) feeds on negativity, and forcing its listeners to believe that there are serious problems with their local teams. Referring to the 2007 season in which the New York Mets suffered a terrible collapse but the New York Giants unexpectedly won the Super Bowl, sports radio talk superstar Mike Francesa has said, "For us (the sports media), the Giants winning the Super Bowl the way they did, that's a 9. The Mets collapsing the way they did? That's a 10."
Anyone who follows the Mets knows there is no sugar coating how badly they played at the end of 2007, but the sports media insisted that this was the WORST COLLAPSE IN THE HISTORY OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. Not one person, however, has sufficiently explained how blowing a 7 game lead with 17 games to play was worse than what the 1964 Phillies did, which was blow a 6.5 game lead with 12 games to play. Both are choke jobs, no doubt, but because the media insisted that the recent Mets' collapse was more precipitous, it became truth, without any logic to support the assertion.
This kind of phenomenon is ubiquitous. I was mildly amused but also troubled by a recent conversation I had with a person from Quebec. I had mentioned that my mom had, for one reason or another, always insisted that the province's name was pronounced "Ke-Bec" instead of "Kwe-bec." Somehow or other, this person characterized the pronunciation as an opinion, rather than a fact. How can the pronunciation of a word be subject to opinion? If you uttered the word "forest" and it sounded like "xylophone", I'm sorry, but you'd be wrong. But because so many people say "Kwe-bec", even people from Quebec have resigned themselves to the fact that it can be pronounced either way!
This lowering of our standards is dangerous. Anything that is said can become truth, as long as no one is brave enough to say "You're wrong," - two words that people have found it increasingly difficult to say. But we must re-learn to say them. Before I go, I will leave you with this link to a clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which illustrates this idea almost as well as I have. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eSwq1ewsU
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