Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Fail, fail again, fail better

Chuck Raasch Gannett News Service

I have come to the conclusion, after sitting through two sons’ college and high school commencements, that failure is underrated and underappreciated in America.

Especially in politics. While we often celebrate the spectacular triumphs and magnificent failures elsewhere in life (“American Idol” being Exhibit “A”), the cautious rule today’s politics. In their take-no-prisoners attitude, there is little time or credence given to those who try and fail.

Al Gore may be a recent exception, though he, too, had to endure a kind of Democratic purgatory after losing one of the closest and most disputed presidential elections in 2000. For a long time, Democrats ridiculed Gore, publicly and privately, for blowing the chance to succeed Bill Clinton. Gore recovered only after he regrouped around global warming and went out and made a movie. He re-entered politics, no longer a failure. Now, he is having more impact on global warming than he might have had if he been elected president, boxed in by cautious, self-obsessed foes.

If more politicians were willing to fail, and more of us were willing to let them, the stakes and the challenges would not be any less serious. But the way forward might be less paved with personal ambition and the risk avoidance that infects the body politic. Too often, especially in presidential politics, the winner is the one that makes the fewest mistakes. But that is not the way our young people are being told to go forth into a dangerous, connected and challenging world.

Two weeks ago, one of my sons graduated high school in northern Virginia. Another graduated Stanford last weekend.

Amid the pomp and circumstance, they heard similar messages, ones we do our best to drill out of them in the teach-to-the-test ethos of modern education. From an early age, our kids learn more about the consequences of failure than they do about the thrill of stepping into the unknown. At Stanford’s baccalaureate, the Rt. Rev. William Swing, a retired Episcopal Bishop and head of a new religious understanding initiative, urged prospective graduates to forget about the former, to embrace the latter.

“Fail early and get it over,” he said. If nothing else, he said, if you learn to deal with failure early in life, at least “you can raise teenagers.” The audience full of parents who had just raised teenagers laughed, and nodded heads when Swing told the prospective graduates to “pay attention to your daydreams.”

A week earlier at my son’s high school graduation, a very different speaker, the colorful entrepreneur and oil-man T. Boone Pickens, told of his own boom-and-bust years and said he’d learned as much from failing as succeeding. Now approaching 80, Pickens said he’d trade places with any 18-year-old graduate, giving up all his wealth, all the planes, all the fame and accolades for another shot at life’s promise. He sounded eminently and passionately believable.

The greatest failure, the most devastating failure, is that which comes through ignorance. Swing, whose United Religions Initiative seeks to bridge differences between Christians, Muslims and other religions, told Stanford’s students they could not afford to ignore the reality that something is “radically wrong in the interaction among and between religions.”

Stanford’s passionate student baccalaureate speaker, Nikki Pareno Serapio, devoted his undergraduate years to speaking out against the genocide in Darfur. Serapio offered no pretense that he had all the answers, but he saw failure only in doing nothing.

“Good works,” Serapio said, “trump all.”