Everyone hates being wrong. We hate it so much that we yell and fight with every breath we’ve got to prevent it. At the first sign we might be wrong, we grasp at anything and everything we can to keep that perception of correctness alive.
Everyone want to be right. We want to feel validated, like we’re on the right side. We justify our existence with correctness. When we attach ourselves to a belief it becomes a part of us, and letting that go becomes incredibly personal.
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Being wrong hurts.
The problem here is this incredible fear of being wrong can lead to selective ignorance. We would rather maintain a belief that we are right than accept the possibility we’re holding onto something false. This can take form in supporting a public figure you think champions your ideals and ignoring their more hateful, offensive moments. It can also take the form of submerging yourself in bubbles filled only with people you agree with. Regardless of what it looks like, it’s still avoidance. You can still be wrong. And on Tuesday we learned that a lot of people were wrong.
We learned that the polls were wrong. Buzz words like “scientific” and “statistical” assure us that things are to be trusted. We look to professionals from all sides who live off of being accurate. We trust them. But they were wrong.
We learned that the media was wrong. This election cycle may have caused some of us to lose faith months ago, but for many the media still stood as a comforting reassurance. But they were wrong.
Hardest of all, a lot of us learned that the image we had of our country was wrong. Our confidence in the prevailing power of a progressively open, inclusive national ideal didn’t pan out how some of us expected. We thought we were on the fast track. We looked back at all the noise we raised, at the John Oliver clips and rainbow-filtered profile pictures, and we looked ahead expectantly. We had the Chariots of Fire song queued up and ready to go. But we were wrong.
Now we’re angry. Maybe our selective ignorance blinded us, maybe we just totally missed it. Either way, people are confused at how their reality got shattered. But we cannot afford to be confused right now.
We were wrong. Now’s the time to admit it and move on, because staying in denial is dangerous. Lots of people in this country feel terrified and threatened because the rest of us, whose greatest loss on Tuesday was a hit to our pride, were wrong. A lot of them saw this coming. For their sakes, and for the sake of our nation, we cannot continue to deny our mistake.
We cannot deny the roots of what happened. We cannot ignore the institutionalized issues at the heart of our wrongness by attributing it to conspiracy or a faulty system. We can’t split off and run headlong through the forest because a tree fell on the road in front of us.
We cannot let our frustration blind us to the hard road we can’t avoid anymore. We can’t be that kid who gets cut from the team, then throws a tantrum complaining that it wasn’t fair instead of going out into his backyard and practicing for next year.
And we especially cannot write off half the nation as some enemy force beyond hope, because if that’s the case we’re really lost. I cannot stress this enough. If all experience is valid, there is a frightening amount of validity to the election results. There is a huge piece of America whose experience made it valid, and I refuse to believe they are all hateful. Some of us thought we could sweep them under the rug, that we could ignore them until they went away. But exclusion from progress is what we are supposed to stand against. We cannot let hate and fear overcome us.
I was wrong. I was very, very wrong. I was naïve enough to believe this would be easy. And it won’t. It will be exceedingly hard. But my hope is that we can accept how wrong we were, and not deflect it. Because now we have to try again. And we have to do better.
