Protect and Defend

I keep forgetting, but am unfortunately, often reminded (as I was recently), that it’s more important to defend and protect one’s integrity than to wonder if criticism has any validity.  To think, for just a moment, that a person has made a mistake or two along the way, is just unacceptable in our society.  It’s more important, for example, for an adult to feel better, to save face, to “win [the argument], [the point], [the game]” then to acknowledge, for example, any potential wrong to, just as an example, a kid.

(a soccer mom who I know, really wants her kid to win!)

I remain sickened, as previously posted, by the length to which people go to win, primarily because I think that’s what we’re living in right now.  A world of the haves and have nots. Big companies on Wall Street find legal, secret places to have money make its own money until all that money multiplies so much that the companies become so big that there’s where all the money goes and now all anyone can hope for is a small job sweeping part of a floor at IBM.  But, according to Herman Cain, if you don’t have a job right now, it’s your own fault. 

Because of what winning means, because no one’s allowed to make mistakes, the only people who run for political office are most often idiots or liars.  (See the previous sentence, above).

People mistake winning by falsely equating it to the idea of survival of the fittest.  Like, if I’m not right, it means I’m less fit.  It means I’m weaker.  It means—if it’s just me and you left in the world—you win.  You live.  I die because, goddamn it, I was wrong. 

Thing is, most likely, you were already wrong.   Or, I was.   What you or I just didn’t want to do, was to admit it.  And so we live in this murky sea of bullshit because it’s rare (but so goddamn refreshing) to meet someone who calls a spade a spade.  It’s a trite idiom, but I feel like using it.

Maybe we need to have a National Day of Wrong.  Like Yom Kippur, only we openly admit our wrongs.  Maybe we could learn to admire people who admit mistakes and try to do better.  When the guy from Gray’s Anatomy had the gay slur and then went on to become a gay advocate, everyone questioned his motives.  I don’t care about his motives.  We will never know his motives.  Can’t we only know someone’s behavior, anyway?  It was a good move.  He should be forgiven.

It’s not just these big headlines, though.  It permeates the air: it’s everywhere.  Winning at all costs happens every second—sometimes it’s also called ‘spin.’  It happens every time a question is evaded or avoided, information is withheld, people engage in conversations with minds permanently sealed shut, when injustices are ignored or unacknowledged and no action is taken. 

My child and my students are growing up in a win-at-all costs world.  Maybe, as human beings, this has always been the way things were.  I have no idea.  All I know is it’s reached a toxic level.  Maybe, the world became so populated and winning has become so much more difficult, that it’s transformed who people are and now everyone’s just bloodied and bruised and still shooting for the win. 

Why is it so hard to be wrong?  Are we supposed to always be right? 

What is it we’re being right about?  What is it we’re winning?   What’s behind door number three? 

I don’t need a new refrigerator, do you?