Admit When You Are Wrong!

In his book Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell makes the point that "it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment." He also notes that "undefined words have a special power in politics." "Fair" is one of those words. Sowell asks, "Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness?" Elected officials, leaders of movements and causes,intellectuals and academics cannot readily admit that some policy or program they advocated has turned out badly, because to make such an admission would risk their whole careers. However, the costs of not admitting to be wrong may be too high to ignore.

I left Iowa, the state where I lived for the first seventeen years of my life, to go to college in Texas. It was culture shock, just as it would have been if I had been raised in Texas and then gone off to college in Iowa. The most notable shock was racial discrimination. The "Colored Only" signs at drinking fountains, segregation in so many areas of life, and the beaten down servility I observed in people with dark brown skin, was something I had never seen.

My second job after graduating from college was in child welfare. During coffee breaks I would talk about racial injustices I was seeing firsthand or watching reported on the Huntley/Brinkley Report on television. My supervisors told me not to watch the "Frontly (for communist front)/Pinkley" Report. Then, JFK was assassinated in Dallas, and some Texans were actually proud that he was killed there. Of course, people like that were a tiny, but loud minority, but by 1964, when I went north to go to graduate school at the University of Kansas, I wanted to be a change agent.

I wanted people who had been downtrodden to hold their heads up high, not bow down to masters. Like Obama, I was influenced by the writings of Saul Alinsky, who was serious about changing power imbalances. I got involved as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization. The idea for NWRO seemed like a good one: getting the poorest of the poor, without regard to race or gender, to stand up for themselves with dignity and self respect. The fallacy, though, was that in order to achieve dignity, they needed less welfare, not more. They needed to pursue a lifetime of accomplishment. They needed faith that one day they could actually be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Dr. Martin Luther King was the man who showed the way, not me.