My new hero

2-5-09

“I screwed up.” Who knew those words would make me fall deeply in love with someone. When our president said those words on Anderson Cooper, I felt a swelling of pride for the man. I didn’t care how he screwed up or what he was going to do in order to fix said screw up. I was just enamored with the man, the leader of our country that just admitted fault on national television.

This is something that really shouldn’t be that amazing. Yet it is. Looking back at history, so many politicians have flat out lied to us. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” “I am not a crook” and countless other statements have been made by elected officials which have no truth behind them whatsoever. I know, it isn’t shocking. I mean, if a politician doesn’t lie, he must be lying about being a politician. Perhaps that is what makes Obama so remarkable.

It isn’t just that, though. Not only is it amazing that the president admitted fault, the fact that a human being admitted fault blew me away! How often in life these days does someone actually admit fault? I know on a daily basis I see errors being made, with no one ever stepping up and taking responsibility for it. I’m not just talking about people cleaning up the mess, either. Just simply saying they did something wrong would be a great step in the right direction.

A coworker told me yesterday about how when she approached another coworker about how a particular task was handled incorrectly, he dodged responsibility and told her, with a growl nonetheless, “Oh well, it is already done.” One might assume that he was in fact saying it was done poorly. But instead of agreeing with her that he had made a wrong choice he got defensive about it and refused to listen to input. How is this productive?

They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. This isn’t just the steps for alcohol abuse. This is true for all aspects of life. If you are looking to grow as a person, you need to be able to accept that more often then not, you are going to make mistakes. Why not own up to them? Going back to our buddies in office, don’t you think that had Clinton just come out and said, “Yup, I hit that” that there wouldn’t have been as much of a problem? His private indiscretion became a bill for you and I to have to pay with our taxes. It is especially aggravating when really, we all knew the truth. Most people probably wouldn’t care (Oh no! a president cheated on his wife! Not that!), and it certainly would not have been as big a news story that it became.

Why don’t people want to say they screwed up? I suppose fear of reprimand is the first thing that comes to mind. You make a mistake and you don’t want to get in trouble for it. Of course they don’t look at the big picture to see that had they just fessed up in the first place, the problem would not have become even worse, as they often do. In fact, many of the biggest lies that folks get busted on are not the source of punishment. It is all in the cover-up. Clinton didn’t get in trouble for playing hide the cigar with an intern. He got in trouble for lying under oath. The consequences for that are so much higher. By doing that, he added impeachment to the ass kicking he undoubtedly got from Hilary. Maybe he did that on purpose as those hearings got him out of the house. Touché, Mr. Clinton.

I just wish that more people in authority would be ok with having flaws. People who are managers, mayors, ministers, and teachers, all of them have lied about their wrong doings, which in turn makes them less trustworthy, and gives a bad name to all those who work in the same profession. They do these horrible things, and then bold face lie about it, despite the glaring evidence to the contrary. When they do this, the next time something happens that really wasn’t the fault of another professional, we don’t believe them because of course the last time we heard that story we were hit with the truth being nothing close to it. Folks are not only crying wolf for their own lives, they are now jeopardizing other people’s reputations.

Obama offers not only hope for our country in terms of is policies and plans. Today, I see hope because he has shown folks that it is possible to be a leader and a decent human being. Sure, his inauguration speech was inspiring, but not as much as those three little words of “I screwed up”. He has just given the power to everyone of us to know that we can make mistakes, and that we are all in the same boat. With the pressure of finding out who to blame being gone, the time spent now will be to make things better. What a much more efficient way to spend time. I think there is a chance for America after all.