Failure Is The Best Teacher

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

As I recover from my second total knee replacement surgery in 7 months, I have lots of time on my hands.  Pain brings with it reflections of past pains – the time I fell off a roof and broke a foot – that time I took a hockey puck in the face – that high school chemistry teacher that called me “dummy” and threw chalk at me.  Oh, the pain and trauma – woe is me.  Perhaps I should spend my entire adult life trying to overcome such difficulty and trauma.  Or, perhaps I should learn from my mistakes and move on.  And so we have just divided leading Democrats from everyone else.

Sunday, Axios carried a story about leading POTUS hopefuls “leaning in to their childhood traumas.” This resulted in massive amounts of ridicule on X and Monday Stephen Green commented on PJ Media at length.  I wish it were that easy.  I fear Dems really do see the world in those sorts of terms and it is having very real effects.  I mean, let’s be honest, what are issues like reparations and race-based college admissions if they are not efforts to overcome the “trauma” of a rough childhood?

A study on grade inflation (How dare we inflict those youngsters with the pain of failing grades?) was recently released and it is costing its victims very real money as they subsequently cannot perform on the job.  Democrats are so focused on relieving all this childhood trauma that they are forgetting the fundamentals of the jobs to which they are elected.  Think of all the fraud in Minnesota and California.  This thinking is actually being quite destructive.

On the one hand, what we are seeing is an extension of Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain,” brand of politics.  After all, in an age where “thoughts and prayers” are commonly derided in response to a school shooting, sympathy must produce action, no matter how ludicrous that action may be.  Democratic politics are all about sympathy->action, no matter how few people suffer from whatever we are sympathizing with and regardless of the cost of that action to everyone else.  And so, candidates rushing to create a sympathetic image are, in this sense, unsurprising.

But there is more at play.  This sort of thinking equates failure with victimhood.  No one fails anymore, they are just a victim of….  And since my failures are no longer my fault, there is nothing for me to learn from them.  Consider those childhood traumas I opened with.  They are all real.  The broken foot?  I was an idiot being on the roof to begin with.  The hockey puck to the face?  It was my  second time on the ice, ever.  It was later in childhood after spending my elementary school years in Texas where hockey was unheard of.  I needed to stick to football.  And that awful chemistry teacher?  Well, he reserved such admonition for his best students.  I took it in the spirit in which it was meant and ended up majoring in chemistry in undergrad and graduate school.  I was not a victim in any of those instances, unless I had chosen to be.  I could either learn from those failures and get better, or I could wallow in my victimhood.

Democrats; however, want victims.  Victims are a dependent class, a class they can rule over by virtue of “helping.”  Sadly that “help” is designed to keep them dependent.  I think I’d rather learn from my failures.

There is a deeper level of analysis; however.  If we are victimized, instead of simply failing, then we are without fault.  And if we are without faulty, well, what role is their for God in this world really?  Sadly; however, without God, the world never really seems to work right.

This political strategy by Democrats is quite insidious.