Time & Perspective Quote by Major Owens

Competition gets sold as the cleanest engine of progress: meritocratic, motivating, almost moral. Major Owens punctures that civic bedtime story by calling it a "virtue" with a bite of sarcasm. The line reads like praise, then flips into indictment. If everyone is "so busy competing" that compassion becomes a luxury item, the culture hasn’t merely prioritized ambition; it has reorganized time, attention, and dignity around winning.

Owens, a Brooklyn congressman with deep roots in public service and civil rights politics, is speaking from inside the machinery that most worships competition: electoral politics, budget fights, and the endless contest over whose needs are "deserving". The subtext is that compassion isn't absent because people are individually callous; it’s crowded out by systems that reward rivalry and punish softness. When everything is scored and ranked - jobs, schools, neighborhoods, even grief - empathy starts to look like inefficiency.

The sentence also exposes a moral sleight of hand. By labeling competition a virtue, society gives itself permission to treat the fallout as natural: losers must have lacked grit, and the winners must have earned their safety. Owens suggests the opposite: a culture that needs constant competition to function is quietly confessing it can’t sustain solidarity.

It works because it lands on a plain, almost domestic detail - "no time". Compassion isn’t framed as an abstract ideal but as an everyday practice squeezed out by busyness. The most damning critique isn’t that competition is evil; it’s that it makes people too occupied to notice who’s being harmed.