By BEN R. WILLIAMS
For literal decades now, I’ve been hearing people complain about Millennials and our participation trophies.
People say that you shouldn’t give kids awards just for showing up, that it makes them entitled and discourages both poor students/athletes and talented ones from putting forth their full effort. They say that participation trophies ruined the Millennial generation.
As a Millennial, I feel that our generation was actually ruined by false promises, low wages, and a terrible economy. But that’s beside the point.
I actually remember what it was like to get participation trophies.
When I was a child, my school had an annual Field Day. All the younger kids would play different games, stuff like thee-legged races and egg-and-spoon races and wheelbarrow races. In retrospect, it was heavy on the racing element.
Much like Tony Soprano, I never had the makings of a varsity athlete. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that the sports I most excel at are the ones that can be played while also drinking a beer: darts, bowling, pool, and pinball. I racked up quite a few participation trophies on field day.
I vividly remember my buddies and I comparing our ribbons at the end of field day. We all got at least one second or third place ribbon, but some of us had ribbons for 11th place or worse.
We thought our little ribbons were a joke. We laughed about them. I don’t think any of my classmates felt a genuine sense of achievement for getting a ribbon acknowledging that they came in 11th place in a field of 11.
The worst thing about participation trophies was that they were embarrassing. If you were the kind of child who knew more about how to get all three warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3 than you knew about the basic rules of football, you didn’t really want any light shed on your athletic prowess.
While obvious, it’s also worth pointing out that we weren’t giving ourselves these things. We were given participation trophies by Boomers who would later go on to mock us for receiving participation trophies.
My point is this: even in third grade, the general consensus between me and my classmates was that participation trophies were a meaningless waste of time and somewhat humiliating.
But the single most embarrassing participation trophy I have ever seen in my life was not bestowed upon a Millennial. Far from it!
It is difficult to imagine an award more embarrassing than the FIFA Peace Prize and a recipient more undeserving than President Donald Trump.
It’s ridiculous that FIFA — an organization known for corruption, bribery, exploitation of migrant workers and obscene human rights violations that also dabbles in soccer — would offer a peace prize. It’s hilarious that it would create this prize for the sole purpose of giving it to a massively influential politician who’s been really ticked off lately that he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s infuriating that the recipient of said peace prize has mostly been making the news lately because his hand-picked Secretary of Defense — I’m sorry, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — has been ordering the Navy to conduct strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and then go back and kill the survivors, which is a literal war crime. We didn’t even do that to the Nazis during World War II, and they were the NAZIS.
But more than that, it’s just embarrassing, and Trump’s gleeful acceptance of the sham award — which I suspect will be both the first and last of its kind — fully deserves every ounce of mockery it has received.
And I don’t want to hear about my generation and our participation trophies ever again.
