Back to reality

First published in the Wakefield Daily Item Forum, December 9, 2020.

Losing is hard. Back when I was in elementary school, we used to play a game called Greek Dodge. I’m not sure what was Greek about it; it was basically dodge ball with two teams on either side of a line. A kid on one side would throw the inflated rubber ball as hard as they could at someone on the other side, who would either dodge it, or catch it. If the ball hit them and bounced off, they were out. If they caught it, the thrower was out. This elimination game continued until there was a winner.

I remember a particular game when I was ten years old or so. I was an athletic, competitive kid and liked to win. It had come down to a few kids on each side and I could taste the glory of victory. A childhood rival, also a good athlete, had me in his sights and fired off a rocket. I lunged aside, almost avoiding elimination, but the ball deflected off my back at an obvious angle. I was out. Everyone saw it.

My childish emotions got the better of me and I grabbed the ball and spiked it on the blacktop. I loudly and ridiculously argued there had been a foul, that my rival had stepped over the middle line when he threw the ball. But he hadn’t been anywhere near the line. Everyone saw. I kept up my harangue and then, I’ll never forget the stern voice of my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Pitzer: “Thanks a lot, Kehoe!” She ended the game early and the whole class had to go back to the classroom and put our heads down on our desks for the remainder of the recess period. I could feel my classmates’ resentment and anger, many of them echoing the teacher’s sarcasm as they passed by me: “Thanks a lot!” I was filled with shame.  

Watching President Trump’s behavior since he lost the election, over a month ago, has made me think of my own bad behavior in that childhood game. Except that in order for me, back then, to match Trump’s current mayhem would have meant my going way beyond just arguing – more like running over and punching my rival in the stomach, cursing out Mrs. Pitzer, then setting the school building on fire.

In evaluating this behavior, there are two parts to consider: the sportsmanship part and the reality part. I’ve raised my kids in Wakefield and they all played sports. Any parent knows that when it comes to sports, one of the first things you teach your kids is that, while it’s good to try hard and to want to win, winning isn’t everything. You need to play by the rules, and to learn that while losing is hard, accepting defeat graciously is part of the game and being a good sport. If your pursuit of winning means breaking rules and an inability to accept losing, you’re just a poor sport and a sore loser, as I was that unfortunate day long ago. The reason we teach our kids these things is that they’re not just sports lessons, they’re life lessons – crucial for becoming a mature and responsible grownup.

Even more important is the reality part. If you think about it, Trump’s refusal to concede an election he clearly lost is perfectly consistent with his behavior on a number of other important issues: COVID-19, climate change, the changing demographics of the country. He is unable to deal with difficult or complex reality, with facts and news and real-world phenomena he doesn’t like. Rather than deal with these things himself, let alone help the country to deal with them, he denies their reality and creates an alternate reality that suits his aims and that his followers can rally around. He has done this continuously over the last four years, supported by Fox News and other media outlets.

But how, you might ask, did we get to a point where basic facts and reality are in question? Previous to 2016, if you had used the term “fake news” one might have thought you were talking about sensational, tabloid-like media sources of the National Enquirer ilk. But leading up to that election year, a handful of actual fake news sites began to appear, spreading amazing or shocking – and completely false – rumors in pursuit of massive clicks (and of course the big advertising revenue that comes with the clicks). The number of these fake news sites grew and at some point Trump noticed. Then, in a darkly ingenious flip shortly after his election, Trump coopted the term and began calling legitimate media channels (or any channel that ran a story critical of him in any way) “fake news.”

I felt instinctively then, as did many others, that this attack on truth, fact-based reporting, and the free press was extremely dangerous and destructive, and this has proven to be the case. Over the last four years it has led to a bizarre situation similar to that depicted in the sci-fi thriller, The Matrix, in which the reality experienced by the main character, Neo, depends on whether he takes a blue pill or a red pill. More concretely, it has led to a country more divided than at any time in our history, where it can truly seem as if we are living in two separate countries.

This is not just politics or some abstract, philosophical issue. The costs are all too real. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker: “It is now estimated that one American dies every minute from COVID-19. Every two or three days, there is a 9/11-scale death count. How many of those people died because they chose to believe the President’s dismissive accounts of the disease rather than what public-health officials were telling the press?”

We need to get back to reality. This means trusting competent and experienced scientists, professionals, and experts, whose job it is to describe and analyze what’s going on in the world. Leaders – whether they’re presidents and governors, or mayors and town councilors – have a special responsibility in this regard, and I am grateful that President-elect Joe Biden appears to appreciate this. When the facts that these experts and professionals reveal are grim and the truth is cold and hard, it is up to leaders not just to recognize that difficult reality for themselves, and to accept it with gravity and decorum (like grownups), but to help their people come to grips with it and get through it. That means, first and foremost, acknowledging and telling the truth, even if it’s not what they want it to be, or not what people want to hear.

And for our part, we all need to be thoughtful and responsible citizens, ensuring that our information sources are fact-based and taking on a kind of C-SPAN mindset, where the primary goal is to see the world as it is, problems, tough news, and all. Then, we need to be grownups and to figure out how to fix those problems, together.

© Jeff Kehoe