To err is human

By Patricia Hunt
Published: October 3, 2008

I may feel a lot worse about the country than I did a short time ago, but my self-esteem has received a real boost. Just yesterday in admitting to a little mistake, I said by way of apology that at least I am not head of Bear Stearns or Wachovia Bank. At least I wasn’t supposed to be running the Securities and Exchange Commission. I hadn’t made any statements to the media about how there was nothing to fear from the subprime mortgage mess.

I used to look at these people who headed up important government agencies or financial institutions because they looked like they knew a whole lot more than I did. They also wore better clothes and lived in better houses. They went to prestigious schools and had degrees in law and business. Now I look at them and am grateful that I haven’t screwed up nearly as badly as they have.

Of course, the reason I haven’t screwed up as badly is simply because I haven’t had the opportunity. I do things like lose my car keys and say to myself, sometimes out loud, “What is wrong with me? Why am I such an idiot?” I can’t screw up big things because no one has ever put me in charge of them. It is kind of a relief. But I do wonder if those important people ever walk around in their houses saying “What is wrong with me? Why am I such an idiot?” I hope so. It would make me feel better about them.

I wish more of them would get out good stationery, the kind my mother taught me to write Emily-Post-approved notes on, and pen a simple apology to the American people. Then I would like for them to tell us that they are taking most of their ill-gotten gain and giving it to help out people in need. I’ll leave it to them to name the cause.

They don’t have to fall on their swords or jump out windows, but hanging onto tremendous wealth and multiple houses just seems like bad form. It’s like a bank robber apologizing but refusing to tell us where he stashed the loot.

I am not holding my breath waiting for an apology. Probably some of the screw-ups will write books about what went wrong and make even more money. Some will get big speaking fees where they will be paid $10,000 an hour to tell us why things turned out as they did.

For the time being it is enough for me to know that they are as fallible as I am. I will not use the situation as an excuse to value ignorance or proclaim that education doesn’t count. It does. I don’t want an uneducated person doing surgery on me or running important institutions in business or government. The problem was not that they knew too much; it was that they knew too little: too little history and too little wisdom from the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions. They had not studied the catastrophic failures of smart people in the past. Their arrogance was born of too little knowledge, not too much.

In the future I will trust them less, look up to them less, but have more compassion for their humanity. They have feet of clay. They are not all that special. They are a lot like me. They’ve been knocked off pedestals they should never have been on in the first place. They were never Masters of the Universe. Like the Wizard of Oz, there were just regular people behind the curtain. No need for Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and me to cower – or gloat. Maybe now, together, we can get down to the hard business of finding out how to get back to Kansas.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.