Used to be tackling someone in a game of football was no big deal. The tackler would pick himself up, dust himself off and shuffle back to the huddle in silence. There was no strutting, no stomping, no screaming to the heavens. Used to be you could go an entire game and never once see a chest beaten, a bicep flexed, a fist pumped.
No more.
When a tackle occurs in the Super Bowl tomorrow – even if it is the most ordinary and routine – you will be tempted to think the Arizona Cardinal or the Pittsburgh Steeler making it just won the Powerball. Or someone set fire to his shoes.
Achievement alone no longer satisfies us. With accomplishment now must come acclaim. The world must know of our exploits, must take note of our deeds, and if it is slow to ask or indifferent, no matter. We'll tell it.
What else would explain our stampede to set up tributes to ourselves on the Web faster than you can say me-me-me?
The Pew Internet & American Life Project this month reported that 65 percent of all American teenagers who use the Internet have profiles on Facebook or MySpace or other online social network sites.
But now so do 35 percent of adult Internet users.
Three years ago, according to Pew, only 8 percent of adult Americans who surf the Web had an online social network profile for others to see photos of them and their families or photos of them and their friends or photos of them and their pets or photos of them and their possessions or photos of just them.
Most of the adults who have Facebook or MySpace profiles told Pew their motivation for having a profile is to keep track of their friends. Few said they do it to promote themselves. To which I can only say: OMG RU serious?
From top to bottom, we at times appear to be a nation of narcissists more interested in ourselves than others, less selfless than selfish.
In his inaugural address the other day, Barack Obama said if America is to turn it around, if it is to make it through these tough times, it will take a willingness among its citizens "to find meaning in something greater than themselves."
If that's true, I'm not so certain I like our chances.
It was ego and vanity, after all, that landed us in this fix in the first place. We have CEOs who think they are worth 1,000 times more than the people who work for them. We have representatives in Congress convinced the Preamble to the Constitution begins: Me the People. We have executives on Wall Street who ruin the biggest economy in the world and then reward themselves with billions of dollars of bonuses.
Even for this president who champions hope, asking Americans to get over themselves and practice a little self-sacrifice seems like a lost cause.
But then someone like Jamie Hamley comes along, and you find yourself wondering if maybe, just maybe what Barack Obama said the other day while standing in the cold on the steps of the U.S. Capitol isn't simply wishful thinking.
Hamley is the 33-year-old Sioux Falls man who, after coming upon a fiery automobile accident Tuesday morning on his way to drop off his daughter and son at school, jumped out of his mini-van, grabbed a fire extinguisher from the back, sprinted toward the two-door sports car engulfed in flames, found the driver's door locked, raced to the passenger side where the window was broken out, took a deep breath and stuck his head into the thick, black smoke billowing inside the vehicle again ... and again ... and again until he finally found its driver: 20-year-old Cody Doohen. Hamley put his arms under the bleeding and almost unconscious Doohen and pulled him to safety seconds before the 1990 Nissan exploded.
From the time he put his mini-van in park to the time he placed Cody Doohen on the side of the road, Jamie Hamley had but one thing on his mind: Somebody needed him. From the time he put his mini-van in park to the time he placed Cody Doohen on the side of the road, never once did Jamie Hamley think of himself or his own interests.
"If anybody needs help and I come across them," Hamley says, "I'm going to do anything I can. I guess that's just my character. That's who I am."
And how all of us ought to be.