Over the past few days, I’ve been struck by the unfair nature of the subjective decision. When personal opinion weighs more than the apparent facts. The opposite of the objective decision.

The first example was Friday night, when I happened to watch a few minutes of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I had really made an effort to avoid the games, and I’ll explain why in a moment. But there was nothing else on, and I was sucked in by the story line of American speed skater Apollo Ohno winning the most medals of any Winter Olympian.

Ohno skated an amazing semifinal where he literally had to jump over other skaters who had fallen to make it to the final medal race. In the final, he appeared to be headed for a fourth–and last place finish, when two of the skaters ahead of him went down, leaving Ohno to finish behind the Candian favorite, Charles Hamelin, apparently capturing a silver medal.

But wait, a Canadian referee reviews the video replay and determines that Ohno will be disqualified, because the American put his hand on the hip of third place Canadian skater Francois-Louis Tremblay. Trmeblay then falls, and the decision is that Ohno had caused the fall. I’ve watched the video a bunch of times, and in the ice skating-meets roller derby style of short-track speed skating, I don’t know how you can objectively say one way or the other if Ohno caused Tremblay’s fall.

So a subjective decision costs a great athlete an Olympic medal. Heaven knows its not the first time, and it is why I just can’t watch most of the Olympics anymore, because of the politics of subjective judgement. It isn’t always who finishes first, often it is about what the judge or referee from whatever country happens to think. Even if the judge is from the same country as the competing athlete is from.

A similar judgement struck closer to home on Saturday at my younger daughter’s cheerleading competition. Her team ended up finishing in second place to a squad that clearly didn’t have as clean a routine, so when the coach got the team’s score at the end of the meet, we learned that the judges had taken off five points as a penalty for our team’s routine running three seconds over the maximum 2:30 time on the floor. This knocked their first place total score down to a second place one.

I know, I can hear you say “rules are rules”, and I agree with that premise. But there is more to consider in this situation. Her team was the second team of the day to perform. The organizers of the competition didn’t have their act together at the beginning of the event, and they sent our team out on the floor before the judges had completed scoring the first team to perform (the ones who finished in first place, of course). So our team ends up standing “frozen” for their start for about three minutes before being announced and their music being cued to play.

It caused the appearance of a false start, which created a much longer than normal “wait in the starting blocks”, if you will. So now the timing of the routine becomes a subjective call. And thus the penalty for going three seconds long costs the better performing team a first place finish.

The weekend continued this theme, when my older daughter received a letter from a major university rejecting her from the graduate school program she applied to. Again, I get it–they had thousands of applicants and precious few spots to fill, so some people had to be excluded in the process.

But how do you do that without an interview, or even a phone conversation? How do you evaluate a person simply from a piece of paper or two? Again, I get it–that is how the world works. Maybe a person doesn’t have the qualifications or experience being sought, so that becomes an easy decision. But what happens when all the qualification are there? Then it is a matter of a subjective decision by someone, who you hope is acting with the best of intentions.

By now, you’ve probably concluded that this is just a rant from an over-protective father who can’t stand to see anything bad happen to his daughters, and there probably is some truth to that conclusion if I am candid with myself.

But in none of these cases was there a massive overreaction. We didn’t stage a public protest or start screaming at the cheerleading competition. I’m not threatening to send off nasty letters to the clearly inept university. Heck, even Apollo Ohno was smiling when he had the audacity to point out in the interview after his race that it seemed a little odd how the race was decided.

He then went on to anchor a relay team that won the US a bronze medal, making him our Winter Olympian to win the most medals ever.

And yes, I know there will be other cheerleading competitions and universities for both of my daughters and I will continue to be “a homer” for them, as they learn the valuable life lesson of what is fair isn’t always what happens in the end.

But more and more, I get the sense that what is fair isn’t what is happening in so many parts of our collective dialogue. These days it is so much more about the politics of derision, rather than any push to serve the public. We’re more into listening to the screeds of talk radio mouthpieces than we are into hearing from anyone who might have a thought on the other side of an issue. We’re more likely to throw out hateful speech as online graffiti under the virtual darkness of an anonymous post on the internet.

It is much easier to be subjective, when it serves our own cause. Objectivity requires at least the consideration that there might be another side that is more righteous than the one we take.

I’m just wondering if maybe there is room for a little more objectivity in all aspects of our lives.