Failure is real. So is resilience.
This cartoon doesn’t show what Nicholas Kristof thinks it does.
Here’s the thing. If you voted for Trump, you were given an extremely easy moral test and you failed it.
That’s it. That’s a complete sentence. You failed a test.
Tell me about your reaction to that — which I’m betting you had one, even if you did not vote for Trump. Somewhere in your mind, a hackle went way, way up.
Because what I just said right there was not just wrong, it was dangerous. You don’t tell people they failed, and you especially don’t tell men they failed if you’re a woman who is maybe younger than they are and went to college and owns multiple series of wizard novels and eats expensive brunch foods and gets out of breath if the elevator is broken.
There MUST be mitigating circumstances. There must be a way to read the decision to vote for a liar and an assaulter of women and a demonizer of minorities with no credentials, experience, or record of public service, who claimed to be an incorruptible billionaire while never releasing his tax returns and whose money came from slums and ripping off gullible poor people, as opposed to an ex-Secretary of State and Senator who had used her own self-made fortune to eradicate African malaria, as something other than a failed test.
There isn’t, though. If you got distracted by an email controversy you couldn’t even explain, let alone parse — that was a question on the test, and you got it wrong. If you didn’t find that malaria-eradicating Secretary of State relatable and couldn’t imagine going out with her for a beer, that was a question, and you got it wrong. If your pencil hovered over the word ‘woman’ and you were unable to force your hand to circle it, you got that one wrong too.
It’s not just unpleasant, to be told you failed like that. It’s annihilating. It is literally life-threatening. In my copious free time, I volunteer on suicide helplines, and half the calls I take are from people who do not think they can live with the pain of viewing themselves as a failure.
Does that tell me that we need to help people delude themselves into not having failed at anything, including an extremely easy moral test? No. It tells me that we have absolutely no cultural narrative of resilience. And if we don’t start building one we are completely fucking doomed.
Americans don’t hear the word ‘failed.’ They hear ‘valueless, useless, subhuman, evil, dangerously stupid, and under immediate personal attack that I must fight off right now.’ None of those things are true, and they are certainly not true of the Trump voters in my family and friend circle. The only way to correct that is with resilience.
I am resilient because I have failed. I have gotten F’s on tests and papers. I have broken the hearts of people who trusted me and had my heart broken in return. I have been publicly mocked for my body, for my empathy, for my intelligence and weirdness and refusal to hide any of those things. I have been rejected, turned down, fired. I have done my best at things, and had my best not be good enough.
And my failures weren’t Act 2 in my personal superhero movie. They didn’t teach me important lessons, except for how to accept that I failed at something and either try again or move on, which it turns out is the most important lesson of all.
Nicholas Kristof thinks we should not tell Trump voters that they failed a moral test, even though they did. He imagines if we are all very sweet and friendly and pretend they did not fail, they will put down their signs and become better people. Except that is literally the opposite of the truth. You don’t build resilience — and changing your mind on a fraught topic like politics takes a LOT of fucking resilience — by turning away from your failure.
There are other tests to come. You can have failed the one that asked you to vote for the humanitarian woman over the nightmare orange game show host and still pass, for example, the one where you oppose the sitting President who uses the power of his office to attack the free press. Or deports small children to war zones. Or colludes with a foreign power to make an oil fortune and erodes American sovereignty. Or needlessly adds to the national debt with a useless border wall and allows his cronies to take away your health care and your kid’s public schools.
You can have gone with the crowd of yard signs and voted for Trump the man, wrongly, and still go with the crowd of protest signs against Trump the president, rightly. I have no interest in administering a loyalty test to those who will join me in opposing the LITERALLY STATED goal of dismantling the American state. In a very real way, I don’t personally care who you voted for in November. I care if you’re willing to do the work now.
And a lot of people are. That’s what that cartoon is really showing. There is a crowd on the left and a pair on the right. There are still people inviting that pair to abandon their failed test. It’s always been up to them whether they can be resilient and accept it.