‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’
Matt Pearl
I learned a lot about people while I was a schoolteacher, and these days my own children teach me lessons all the time.
One they illustrated for me lately pertained to the dynamics of human bickering.
My kids don’t fight a lot. They’ll argue over a toy, so someone will give someone a shove during the course of a day at home, but they generally get along.
When their spats and disagreements do boil over, however, I have learned that there are factors that can end the fight instantly. The first is a joyful event that distracts them from their bickering, like cookies coming out of the oven. The other is crisis – something gets broken, or a parent lowers the boom, which brings the fight to an abrupt halt.
It would please me to report that our human race matures, leaving behind such juvenile behavior in adulthood. But that certainly has not been my observation.
The evidence is not in our squabbles and disagreements – those are a given– but rather in the types of events that usually end our national bickerings.
Joyful moments have such a power. When a man walks on the moon, or hostages come home, or the ball drops in Times Square: then, in such moments, we seem able to forget temporarily about our fighting, choosing instead to embrace a pleasant moment as a unified group.
Tragedies have the same effect. In my lifetime, I have seen events like the space shuttle Challenger exploding or the 911 attacks take our collective breath away, and for a moment, being an American was more important than being a liberal or a conservative.
We cannot manufacture moments of great joy, and we never wish to see events of tragic consequence; we must therefore spend most of our days watching our leaders–and indeed ourselves and others in our communities–endlessly squabbling over how to make this imperfect world less imperfect.
It astounds me that a nation that has chosen to print In God We Trust on all of its currency could fail to see the irony. In God We Believe might be closer to the truth. Lots of folks say that they think God is real, but most of them don’t trust Him enough to close their mouths for 10 minutes and see what He has done on their behalf.
Instead, we work to solve our problems by poking at the other side of the argument. If the only defense for your perspective is that the other guy’s perspective is wrong, you’re debating on shaky ground.
The adage ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’ has never been more true than it is now. I say it to the boys at home when they’re fighting, because in most cases there’s no clear right or wrong side for me to take. One of the two older boys wants one thing, the second wants another, and each reacts with a harsh word, or a push, or some other sign of disapproval.
What does it take to break up the fight? I know what worked for my mother when my sister and I would squabble excessively: she split us up. She would send me to this chair to sit, Luara to the couch facing the other direction; when we had calmed ourselves and were ready to play nicely again, our sentence was complete.
If you think such a solution would be too childlike to administer to our arguing parties and leaders in this country, think again. There’s a reason legislative bodies at every level have an end to their annual sessions and a recess from service–and it’s not because they’re working any harder than you and me.
It’s because sometimes the only way to silence two bickering children is to put a little space between them. It is often then they learn better to appreciate one another.
Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.
