Garnering Insight: Hitting for average

Garnering Insight: Hitting for average

For professional baseball players, hitting .300 is a magic number in the game today. However, there are not many professions where successfully doing your job 30 percent of the time is considered a resounding success.

First off, this is not a slight against professional athletes by any means, that would be a whole other topic about their behavior and sense of entitlement and self-perceived importance to society, but these people accomplish things that we mere mortals certainly cannot.

But back to the law of averages.

What if a politician only told the truth 30-40 percent of the time? Wait, isn’t that already the expected standard?

Anyways, what if we here at the paper were only accurate 30-40 percent of the time or if a farmer only had a yield less than 50 percent or a manufacturer only built their item correct half the time or if a medical professional was only successful half the time? It wouldn’t give you a lot of confidence in their abilities.

That .500 average wouldn’t put any of them at the top of their profession or in any hall of fame.

That’s not the standard that we have nor should we have, but it’s one many elected officials seem to subscribe to. We need to hold those who are serving the public to a much higher threshold.

I hold myself to a much higher standard, as well as the product that we at the paper produce.

By no means are we perfect, as Alexander Pope said in his famous poem, “To err is human …” or as singer Billy Joel opines in his song “You’re Only Human,” “we’re supposed to make mistakes.”

What those phrases do not mean, however, is that we should expect subpar performance or out-and-out lies and deceptions as the norm from those in power.

I mean we really are better than that, aren’t we?

If you make a mistake, own it.

Behavior I have seen from those who should know better does not give me a warm fuzzy.

Until we the people stop settling for mediocrity, or in some cases less, we will continue to get what we pay for out of our public discourse.

But here we are in the dog days of summer nearly begging for our national public servants to simply hit for average.

Ken Garner is the owner and publisher of The Maryville Forum and The Post.