When Your Accuser Is Right

A few days ago a posted to my blog something titled, When Your Accuser Is Wrong.  I poked fun, with good reason, at cyber-friends and how when on-line, many of them grow the cyber equivalent of "beer muscles."  And all so true.  But, we are neither invincible nor infallible; we are human, prone to errors, and one day, surprise surprise, we will die.  We make mistakes, errors in judgement, and flat out screw up.

Often, we make decisions based on all the available information that we can lay our hands on.  But here is the rub:  we ignore all that stuff that contradicts what we want to believe as true, that stuff that we use to base our decisions.  I am guilty of the same.  And to boot, we feel very smug and good about this platitude that we have created and hold dear.  Then, some guy comes out of left field and points out the errors in our decision/truth/platitude.

Of course, we do not like that when it happens; who the hell is this guy, we ask ourselves with righteous indignation.  It can be worse when it comes out of left field cyber-space.  At this point two things, in varying degrees, happen.  We politely ignore the intrusion into our personal bubble and/or we tell the interloper to piss off.  The second, we admit that we may have made a mistake and begin to look for the error; this move takes some humility.  In the ongoing discovery process, we may be faced with accepting some kind of failure:  the failure on our part of ignoring or completely disregarding all that stood in original opposition to our decision/truth.  Now, we stand face to face with our half-baked reasoning.  We can either correct our error and move on, or stick our heads in the sand, insisting that the righteousness  of our decision/truth is more than enough to know; righteousness is, ah, so smug.  In my opinion, this falls within the arena of faith and belief; having the faith to believe in something that cannot be proven.  No matter how many times we play dress-up with this stuff, the decision/truth is incomplete or flat out wrong.  We live in the 21st century, not the 7th or the 8th.  A courageous man will fix his errors.  Unfortunately, many people have a mainspring so tight that not even electric shock therapy can help them.  

                                                      Copyright @2013 Terry Unger