c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ The politics of whining were in full moan last week as computer moguls gathered in Washington to complain about Microsoft Corp.

Meeting within earshot (they hoped) of Congress and federal regulators, software makers like Netscape, Novell and Sun Microsystems complained that the maker of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office is a bully. Among other things, they accused Microsoft of using its hegemony in desktop operating systems to smother competition in Internet access.

Microsoft dismissed their complaints as sour grapes: They can’t compete in the open market, so they enlist government’s help. How can an industry with over 7,000 separate companies and which has made even the owners of Netscape, Novell and Sun very rich be considered monopolized?

So it went. For a brief staged-for-media moment we watched captains of industry behaving like school kids. And one more serious issue was reduced to whining.

The same thing happened to women’s rights. Serious questions about evolving roles of women, about the rights of women to have equal opportunity and control of their bodies, and about violence against women got reduced to whining:”Boys have all the fun!” It happened to racial justice: The nation’s commitment to redress two centuries of wrong got reduced to whining about quotas.

It’s happening in sports: Absurdly wealthy young men whine about playing time and not being even wealthier, and their wealthy employers whine about stadiums being too small and expensive.

Whining cheapens the debate and, like a celebrity magazine, shifts our focus to the trivial. The issue posed by feminism, for example, wasn’t whether several hundred bright young women could go to medical school and get rich as physicians, but the several million women who get beaten, raped, denigrated and abandoned every day.

Serious debates over values, ethics and faith have been reduced to whining about who gets to picket outside abortion clinics, or whose partner gets included in health benefits, or a TV character’s on-camera sexual preference.

Among the truly powerless, like the swollen-bellied African child moaning for food or the child fending off a parent’s blows, whining is the sad song of despair. But among the faux powerless, whining is the grating sound of someone trying to aggravate and manipulate.

Take major league sports, for example. NASCAR drivers just spent a weekend whining that Atlanta’s speedway is too fast. And in major league baseball, owners of the Minnesota Twins and Florida Marlins are trying to whine their way to public-financed stadiums. Do these complainers truly believe they are powerless, or have they cottoned onto a tool that works?

Whining is lazy. In religious congregations, for example, complaining about the pastor is easier than actually confronting the pastor. Parking-lot whining is easier than taking responsibility for one’s needs or opinions in an open forum. Is it any wonder the mood in many congregations is sour and petulant, or that an estimated 300 pastors are being fired every week, or that one in five congregations is in severe conflict?

Whining is abusive. Am I really a tool of Bill Gates’ megalomania because I begin each work day booting up Windows 95 and a variety of other Microsoft products? I find that offensive. Like millions of computer users, I started with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, then switched to other products because, in my opinion, they were better. Microsoft’s competitors shouldn’t overestimate their ability to regain market share by condescendingly portraying software buyers as fools.

Whining demonizes the other. It isn’t enough to say Johnny has something we want, but we have to paint Johnny as”bad.”The more our beliefs fail to gain an audience, the more shrill we become in stating them, and the readier we are to attack the other as”enemy”and”evil.” Real bullies, of course, learn to ignore whining. Saddam Hussein, for example, read the West’s bluster as whining long ago and pays little attention to it. Petulance even among the super-powerful has reduced the United Nations to a sandbox.

Then real evil has an open field. Whiners, you see, are often just would-be bullies looking for an edge. When deeper questions of power, wealth, community and self-sacrifice get distorted, our capacity to discern truth is diminished. Then someone steps forward, hands an assault rifle to a whiner, and suddenly the tables are turned.

MJP END EHRICH