As we smooth open the shiny pages of 2025 calendars with a blend of hopeful inspiration and fretful trepidation, let’s pause for a moment and consider our position. What transpires in the days ahead will be a heady blend of things that are subject to our control through free will and personal responsibility and things over which we have no control other than the way we respond to them. This is true every year, for everyone.
I spent much of Christmas Day curled up in my chair with the crud, doing what we do when we’re bored, miserable and looking for distraction: scrolling the internet. There were so many “shock and awe” headlines and whiny posts I couldn’t help but check the comments. I know better… but it’s almost irresistible. That’s probably why the Great Algorithms have made it more difficult to read the actual article than it is to read the comments about the articles.
As I scrolled through, shaking my head at the people who definitely did not read the article, all the people who just echoed the previous comments, and the obvious Russian bots, I remembered “the peanut gallery.”
I’ve heard that phrase my whole life, but I’d never researched its origin. The phrase first emerged in the late 1800s during the heyday of traveling vaudeville theater. The peanut gallery referred to the people in the cheapest seats who had the cheapest snacks — peanuts — which they frequently threw at the performers. The phrase gained popularity during “The Howdy Doody Show” on television in the mid-20th century.
The peanut gallery reminds me of those people at professional sporting events shrieking at the players, coaches and referees about how they ought to be playing the game. And the people sitting on their couches hollering at the TV or the radio about politics. To say nothing of the people throwing digital peanuts at each other in the comment section on social media.
All of that made me think of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech, and his quote about the man in the arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
“Cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat” sums up the comment section pretty darn well.
As we peer into the crystal ball for 2025, we have a choice to make: will we stay in the peanut gallery, screaming into the void, or will we take up our position in whatever arenas we’re assigned — home, work, family, career, civic engagement, church, and so on — and do the work at hand? Let’s aim to do the latter, if for no other reason than it’s becoming increasingly clear the corporate overlords are working overtime to keep us in the cheap seats chucking peanuts at each other. It makes us easier to manipulate.
