Remember the Serenity Prayer?
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.”
Maybe we should put it up not just in homes and churches, but over the doors of our courthouses. Because Americans seem to not know the difference anymore.
This week brought news that the parents of a senior at Leon High School in Florida are threatening to sue the school if their daughter doesn’t make the varsity cheerleading squad. The school, which was state runner up in the non-tumbling division at the National High School Cheerleading Championship last year, has a very competitive team. When the young woman, whom the district has not yet identified, fell twice during her tryouts, the coaches decided she didn’t make the cut. Which is when her parents decided it was time to consult a lawyer.
It’s not clear whether the parents have found a “right to be part of a human pyramid” in the US Constitution, but just the threat of litigation is enough to make even the most inefficient bureaucracy spring into action. And so the school district is reviewing the decision of the cheerleading judges.
Contrast the actions of the cheerleading parents with those of 2-year-old Lane Graves, the toddler who died when he was attacked by an alligator while playing next to a pond at Disney World last month. The Nebraska family announced this week that they were not going to sue Disney for this tragedy.
In a statement, father Matthew Graves explained, “Melissa and I are broken. We will forever struggle to comprehend why this happened to our sweet baby, Lane. As each day passes, the pain gets worse.”
Instead of a pursuing legal recourse, though, they decided instead to concentrate their efforts on a charity they have set up in their son’s name.
“In addition to the foundation, we will solely be focused on the future health of our family and will not be pursuing a lawsuit against Disney,” the parents said. It’s perfectly possible they have reached an undisclosed settlement with Disney over this tragedy, but it’s also possible they simply decided that a lawsuit was not going to change anything, at least not anything important. Disney has already gone to great lengths to make sure something like this won’t happen again — removing hundreds of alligators from its lakes and putting up a lot of warning signs. So what is money going to bring?
The parents of the cheerleader may believe they can change the outcome. Yippee! Their daughter gets to be on the squad. What they will not change is that their daughter was not good enough to make it on her own. Nor will a lawsuit change the minds of the adults who thought she was unqualified to begin with.
When everyone runs to court at the drop of a hat…it means that our first inclination becomes to blame others for our misfortunes and never to forgive, let alone give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.
All these frivolous lawsuits do is make an overly litigious society more so.
When everyone runs to court at the drop of a hat (or the drop of a rock on someone’s toe), it means that everything is more expensive, that no one can go about their jobs or their lives without fear of lawsuits and that everything costs more. It also means that our first inclination becomes to blame others for our misfortunes and never to forgive, let alone give anyone else the benefit of the doubt. And rather than use our legal system to achieve justice, we use it to settle scores.
All this, in turn, will take its toll on our families, our schools and our communities. Last fall, two families in Sunnyvale, Calif., sued a third, whose 11-year- old son has been diagnosed with severe autism.
Neighbors allege that he has in the past several years hit other children and bitten an adult who lived across the street. Neighbors want him declared a “public nuisance” and want unspecified damages for the harm done to their children. They also claim that the boy’s behavior has had an “as-yet unquantified chilling effect on the otherwise ‘hot’ local real-estate market” and that “people feel constrained in the marketability of their homes as this issue remains unresolved and the nuisance remains unabated.”
In September, Superior Court Judge Maureen A. Folan asked the parties: “The question I have for each and every one of you is: Do you want to be solution-oriented and a great role model for your kids? Or do you want to be the opposite of that, and be litigation-oriented?”
For more and more Americans, it seems the answer is the latter. From life’s small nuisances to its great tragedies, it seems that we can no longer accept bad luck as an explanation for things going wrong. Nor can we imagine taking any personal responsibility for making things better.
Instead stomp our feet and demand that someone “make us whole again.”
But God knows that’s not what courts are for.
Check out the heartbreaking testimony of a man that was laid off by Disney: