No one likes to be wrong. I think it’s something we can all agree on. Yet I am always surprised to see how unable some people are to admit a mistake.
I don’t always have to be right, but I want to do what is right (but we all want to be right, right?). There’s a difference between making a mistake and turning a blind eye and allowing things to continue as they are. That’s a big mistake. Huge.
I find no bliss in ignorance. I tend to confront things with honesty rather than pretend they don’t exist. Sometimes the issue is small, like being undercharged while shopping and pointing it out to the salesperson. Sometimes it’s life-changing, like choosing to remove toxic people from your life.
Sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t make you popular. But the in crowd is a shape-shifting thing.
I guess I was popular in school, but I always seemed to have friends that fell into various cliques. My father’s work often whisked me away from Los Angeles a few months of each school year. Months spent with a tutor in another state or country rather than whispering during class with my friends.
In the spring of 1994, for example, I was in 10th grade. The internet was still young, my cell phone was for emergencies only – there was only so much drama I could keep up with long distance. Maybe that’s why I ended up with good friends who would never have been in the same circles on Google +.
Good friends are there for you, and you for them, even if you haven’t seen each other for a few months. The quality of those adolescent friendships went beyond what kind of car they got on their sixteenth birthday, what their parents did for a living or other nonsense that qualifies for social status in 10th grade. (For some it doesn’t end in 10th grade. Or ever.) Drama existed, but it was more mellow dramatic than melodramatic.
It’s heartening to start off this If Emily Posted project with so many people in agreement that wrong isn’t right simply because wrong isn’t going to get in trouble (necessarily).
As the saying goes, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice.”
Thank you for being so nice. Thank you for being part of a crowd I want to hang out with. Let’s make social media the best it can be. Let’s embrace mistakes and then do something about it. xo a
And now, five great things someone else said:
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. - Leo Tolstoy
Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it. -Augustine of Hippo
When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character. W. Somerset Maugham
It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. - Thomas Carlyle
