When Being Right is a Bummer

Would you rather be right and sad or wrong and happy?

My daughter’s daycamp was able to open up this summer thanks to gallons of hand sanitizer and a giant tent with ample space for social distancing. She is nine, and usually spending her afternoons making friendship bracelets and slathering herself in sunscreen with Cheeto stained fingers makes her burst with happiness.

But when I picked her up last Monday, she was quiet and low key. When I asked her why, she said, “Paige thinks tigers are the most dangerous animals in the world.”

It didn’t seem like this fact alone would result in her bad mood, so I pressed. I learned that Harper and Paige had gotten in an argument. While Harper had argued that mosquitoes were the most dangerous, Paige and several other campers had gone to the mat arguing for tigers.

Harper’s argument was built around the idea that mosquitoes transmit deadly diseases, while the other kids were arguing that tigers have big teeth and claws and could, therefore, kill anyone they encountered.

As elementary school students, they weren’t prepared to tackle the nuances of the argument. For example, with only 4,000 tigers left in the wild, each one would have to kill 250 people per year for the number of deaths from tigers to equal the number of deaths due to mosquito bites each year. But then, you could also make the argument that 1:1 in a cage match, a human would face far better odds against a mosquito than a tiger.

What these kids, did understand though, was how to argue.

They understood that in an argument, it’s better to be loud than right. It’s better to be on the side with more people than the side with fewer people. It’s more important to shout than to think.

Which left my daughter confused and alone, wondering what to do as the kids shouted at her from a socially safe distance across the beach.

Armed with only the encyclopedia of random knowledge that comes from growing up in a house where NPR is the constant backdrop, she was helpless to change anyone’s mind. But she also didn’t want to cave and agree that team Tiger was right since she was pretty sure they weren’t.

In the end, time ran out and the parents lined up in their cars to pick up the kids and bring them home for the night.

I don’t know what went on in the other houses, but at our house, the evening was spent on the mosquito/tiger issue and how to smooth things over with the kids at camp the next day.

On one hand, I wanted my daughter to go back to camp armed with statistics and data from the CDC to prove how deadly mosquitoes are. I wanted everyone to know that she was right and I wanted her to feel powerful and confident for not changing her mind when other kids told her she was wrong.

But I also want summer camp to be fun — after all, if that’s not the point, then what is? And how fun is it to be the kid that goes around bragging about being right all the time? Nobody wants to be around that kid.

The thing I forgot when I was mulling all of this over was how short kids’ attention spans are. By the next day, the issue had been dropped and the kids at camp had moved on to the sandcastle competition and winning tickets for the ‘Raffle for Respect’ at the end of the week.

Even though my daughter moved on too, I’m still a little haunted by the incident. It’s not about tigers and mosquitoes, but more about the idea that you can be right and miserable or wrong and popular.

You can believe in science and wear your little mask every time you step outside your door, but it won’t do any good if you’re surrounded by people who think differently and spew their spit droplets in the air as they spout off about how foolish you are for being cautious.

I explained to my daughter that she had to choose between truth and noise. Noise is powerful. It can be overwhelming, like the 4th of July fireworks when you sit too close. Anyone can make noise, whether they are right, wrong, or in between.

Truth is a little less showy. It can be hard to tell the difference between truth and noise sometimes, but with practice, it’s possible. Truth doesn’t beg you to believe in it. Truth isn’t flashy or sudden. Truth is like gravity — you can defy it for a moment, but you can’t get away from it.

It’s easy to block out the truth with noise. Anyone can do it with their voice, their phone, or their keyboard. You can say the craziest, most outlandish thing, but if you say it loud enough or in a big enough font, people will believe you. This creates a positive feedback loop, where more and more and more people keep believing you. It’s like a black hole that sucks people in with little regard for what nugget of nonsense lies at the center.

As a parent, I want my daughter to find a way to be right and be heard. It’s easy to be one or the other, but the real struggle lies in being both at the same time, which is why our political system is such a tangled web of confusing ethics and poor leadership. Too often, the people who are right, the ones who rely on facts and science and data are the ones who are pulled off stage in favor of fun-loving, wacky characters whose ideas are based on whimsy and speculation.

It has to be possible though, right?

We’ve got to be able to change course and put the power back into the hands of the people who speak facts and truth instead of leaving it in the hands of whoever has the loudest microphone.

We’ve sent monkeys into space and turned dead bodies into keepsake diamonds. Surely we can find a way to stop amplifying claptrap and start listening to people who make sense.

And maybe it starts at summer camp. Maybe it starts with my daughter talking to her friends about the threat of mosquito-borne illnesses like West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis.

Probably not though. Chances are she’ll stick to her talking points about the best popsicle flavor and how flip-sequins are so 2019. And I guess that’s fine. After all, it’s summer camp, not the fate of the human species we’re talking about here.

Or is it?

Either way, I’m sending her to camp armed with mosquito repellant.