Written by Andor Carnes   

“Sometimes we just get it wrong”.

Conspiracy theorists surmised in endless convolutions that the Princess Diana tragedy in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris was caused by endless coordinated details of evil intent, culminating in a single harmonious destructive moment. However, the most credible, exhaustive investigative findings, that finally put the major proponents of a conspiracy to bed, concluded that the driver, Henri Paul, simply in a slit second got it wrong and made a grievous set of navigation errors that cost them all their lives. It was no more complicated than that; he just got it wrong –something we are all capable of doing.

Simply because it was feasible to the imagination that such a senseless occurrence could have more than a mistaken hand directing it, incredible resources, vast sums of money and grief were expended to prove something that had no elements of truth, evidence or logic. A fairly vast world pressed to find patterns and data where there were none, and it became a circus of suspect and misguided hope. The more money spent on the process, the more the media reported it, and as it turns out the further they strayed from the truth. The frustrated interest toward any answers over-rode the evidence and logic.

We were fooled because the obvious was not interesting, and the sensational was easier to report and embrace. That is the world we put up with now and demand no better. The fact is that the healing for the family could not begin until the false path being promoted was abandoned for what it was. Unfortunately, there was so much money backing the effort that it took almost ten years to abandon the path.

Our present Presidential Campaign has been in the same vein. Our society wants better, and our Politicians and Political systems deliver slow versions of that better at paces not in line with individual lifetimes. When we see this slow, painful progress happening, and then some catalytic moment drives us deeper into hardship, we want to be told there is a greater truth than what we are experiencing and is in front of us.

We do not want to hear the facts that we simply elected self-serving polymorphs who tell us what they need to for guiding us how to act for their welfare rather than the other way around. It really is that convoluted. We are clearly fooled every time, and we reward the system by taking and endorsing what they feed us, truly regardless of its veracity. The obscene amount of funds spent on these campaigns, with literally no return in our personal knowledge and insights, proves it. All this business as usual, but in this case also bigger, has the effect of slowing down the healing process for our country; however, we still let it perpetuate and escalate.

We never simply say “we got it wrong” and drive the bad seeds out of office for the right reasons. In stead, we run from one “conspiracy” to another, rejecting even things that are good for us, if they do not promise the immediate ideal of what we think is attainable and need. The incumbent did not in four years solve the worst crisis our nation has ever faced; and yet, when a Challenger says they could have solved it, we buy it. This is less than no information. It is vacuous nothing with falsehoods. They show patterns and details that simply do not exist but are ironically highly reportable -proving to us anything can be reported but very little is provable and even less is meaningful.

We are vulnerable to the “conspiracy of nothing” because its purveyors, and the statements they make, no matter how incredible or off-the-truth they are, are easier to grasp than the simplest of observations that those very statements are illogical and wrong. Truth is not as important in our edited world as is the need and search for easy “understanding and hope”. If someone offers a better statement of hope for our lives, it really does not matter to us how fanciful and baseless their claims are. We want patterns that explain things, and we don’t care how we get them.

This Presidential election will go down in history as having been incorrectly labeled a head of time as “close” because of such a “conspiracy of nothing”. A political system simply got it wrong when they evolved a candidate to challenge this Incumbent. The public, pundits, polls and media got it wrong. They mistook what subject issues indicate the better candidate to handle our vast road to healing, recovery and the serious mitigation of the vulnerabilities that caused, for instance, the economy to tank in 2008. The challenging Candidate and their handlers got it wrong when they assumed that the better will of the public would continue right through the election to buy the notion of the total negation of the previous four years and that the polls saying it was a close race were correct.

The useful and positive part is that when the fog clears after the voting is finalized, and the spin and misrepresentations and sensational harbors have all been closed, the public, and even curiously the political system, will have gotten it right and rejected the false data, and manipulations of the Challenger. Most will never admit it, but we just put up the wrong candidate. Not because that candidate could not win but simply because they were the wrong candidate for skill, caring and the knowledge/motivation to protect us. A different Challenger could have been an excellent, capable one and still not have been right to take over the Incumbent’s position. However, somewhere out there, the majority of the public will sigh in relief that we finally saw that we had just got it wrong, and fortunately we caught it in time.

Ultimately, we could look at it all like a spirit of Princess Diana, who looking at such things, so far removed from her tragic incident and her beloved country, could recognize that eventually for the good of everyone from the commoner to the elite, we have to let the contrived theories and falsehoods go; so, the healing can proceed. To prolong the lies and manipulations is to stop the healing and to deny it continuing.

Sometimes people perish from simply a stupid mistake. Sometimes we try to make more of something or someone than they are or ever were. For this election, we gave it the old “college try”, checkbook, to make this Challenger worthy, but all the kings men could not put him together well enough to make him right for the job.

As we can just get it wrong, so too can we just get it right. If we have learned anything from Diana’s tragic accident and the circus aftermath of some very well meaning people doing some very misguided things, it is that we can eventually drop unhealthy notions to get on with the healing. The faster we do that, the more there is real hope.

History, will take proud note of our public for this moment and even greater pride with what we do in the aftermath.

Sometimes, in spite of many of ourselves, we just get it right.