Not Enough Being Right

I wonder now. 

Being right and watching the world spin in another direction is terribly painful. Take the best known example from recent history, Jimmy Carter's "Cardigan Sweater" speech. 

Republicans used that speech to reject everything Jimmy Carter believed in, validating the Nixon Thesis of Conflict and putting Ronald Reagan's smiling face on the cover of it. 

The result? War, mass death, inflation, global warming, and (in time) skyrocketing prices anyway.

Kevin Mattson's "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President" takes apart the speech, the issues, the result, and concludes that the country was wrong to ignore Carter's concerns. The Man himself has taken being right and unpopular as a badge of honor. He has spent his life out of office popularizing all sorts of unpopular causes — Palestinians, homelessness, Africa. He doesn't mind being ignored, even vilified. He just keeps moving forward. His reward is in heaven. 

That's a great Christian attitude, and perhaps in that position the only thing you can do, but it's small consolation, as I've found in my own life.

I saw the Houston oil boom ending a mile away, in the late 1970s. I railed about it privately to everyone I knew, and was roundly ignored. I finally left town on June 1, 1981 — the approximate date the boom ended. 

But it did me little good. I found myself in the middle of Birmingham, Alabama's depression, in a dead-end job I couldn't hold because I was in too much of a hurry and made too many mistakes. 

Four months later I was unemployed, in a strange town, with a wife who had just made her great career move and couldn't follow me to where my work was. Not right away.

We survived that. But almost two decades later I found myself in an identical position. This newsletter was originally called "A Clue…to Internet Commerce" and the main Clue was that the boom was going bust, that we were all headed off a cliff, that the billions in valuation being claimed by the young bazillionaires was fool's gold. 

I was right, of course. I can even date the end of that boom. It was my birthday, January 12, 2000, when Time Warner announced it was buying AOL. 

Did this do me any good? Of course not. My income crashed like everyone else's. Once during the boom I had a six-figure income. I listed all my employers on a sheet of paper near my desk and found myself crossing them all off, one by one, over the next 18 months. I had zero income in 2002, and zero in 2003. 

Being right isn't good enough.

What's true in general can also be true specifically. My emotional life has been marked by my general refusal to bend, and my inability to get others to do what I knew was right. It didn't matter at that point whether I was right in the original argument or wrong. I lost the human connections and I'm the loser for it.

I'm now watching someone else go through the same experience, and it's driving him crazy. He's regressing right into early childhood, circling his own private drain, becoming increasingly isolated from the world of people. It does me no good to tell him he's wrong, that he needs to turn around. As we all know, people have to find their own bottom. The best the rest of us can do is walk away and accelerate the decline, hoping that the fall is hard enough that a light bulb will go off in our friend's head. In time. 

Often, it doesn't. I had a friend once with a terrible secret, one he wasn't even admitting to me. He finally opened up about it to someone else, found relief, but died a year later, suddenly, unexpectedly. I had another friend who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. Finally quit, got his head together. And found out weeks later that he had Stage Three colon cancer. 

One thing I admire about President Obama, something many liberals detest, is that he doesn't take on fights just out of principle, and he doesn't hold out for the last concession. 

I agree with his critics on the merits, that he should push for gays in the military and gay marriage, that he should stand up to the extremists in the CIA and on Wall Street. But he has seen those battles lost, and the people involved in those battles left worse off than before. 

So he bides his time, calmly, working on what he needs to work on, compromising even on that when he has to, accepting that he may have just gotten half a loaf, but knowing also he can go for another bite if necessary.

It's incrementalism. But it's also successful. And if the choice is between being right and getting something important done, I'm old enough to accept the former and stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Pity it took me so long to learn that lesson. But now you have the chance to learn from me. Don't make my mistakes.