COLUMN: Take time to learn from other Aggie mistakes
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” As USU students celebrate the start of a new year, we can pick up a few pearls of wisdom via some of the more colorful mishaps of our political leaders in 2013.
1. Social skills are important.
If you neglected your studies in kindergarten of playing nicely with others, take a remedial class in college. The inability of congressional leaders to hammer out a deal over the federal budget crisis in the early months of 2013 led to the imposition of the “sequester” – a nastily damaging and poorly aimed series of spending cutbacks. While the federal budget certainly needs to undergo cuts in combination with revenue increases to reach fiscal stability, a much better solution than the sequester could have been reached if, say, actual communication and compromise had been employed. We expect to see some of you proud Aggies serving in Congress a few years from now, and we’d be quite delighted if you made elementary social skills cool again.
2. Don’t procrastinate.
You can’t write that 20-page paper the night before it’s due (Yes, we both know you actually can. But you shouldn’t. A principle is at stake here, folks.) Procrastination won’t serve you well in the long term; it leads to a lifestyle of crisis management rather than proactive control, and it might have some nasty unintended repercussions. Congress’ procrastination of raising the debt ceiling led to the United States government being out of a job for more than two weeks in October 2013 due to the federal shutdown. Aggies: tackle problems and projects early and spare everyone, including yourself, the grief.
3. When your brilliant plans don’t work out the way you had hoped, don’t give up.
The much-anticipated launch of the healthcare.gov website in October 2013 was plagued with technical glitches for weeks, preventing many from signing up for the new healthcare exchange. The site slowly reached full functionality, though, and more than two million Americans are now signed up. Hey, life’s tough. Whether it’s your date last Saturday or your quiz next week that falls through, remember to keep your chin up.
4. When you hit a brick wall, brainstorm.
Whether it’s bad case of writer’s block on a research paper or looking for a suitable Friday night activity in Logan, sometimes you just pull a blank. Don’t be defeated. Brainstorm with all the might of your silvery cerebral matter – the more ludicrous the tangents, the better. It never fails. Secretary of State John Kerry accidentally suggested the solution to the chemical weapons crisis in the Syrian civil war when he hypothesized an impending U.S. airstrike on the Assad regime might be forestalled if the regime forfeited its chemical weapons. Kerry himself scoffed at the seemingly ridiculous suggestion, citing the unlikelihood that Assad would ever agree to such a course of action. But Russian president and tiger-wrestling judo master Vladimir Putin seized on Kerry’s inadvertent suggestion, and – shockingly – so did the Syrian regime. Though a ghastly civil war still rages in Syria, the use of chemical weapons by the regime is at least out of the picture.
Learn from the mistakes of others, Aggies, then go forth and conquer. Happy 2014.
– Briana is a political science major in her last semester at USU. She is an avid road cyclist and a 2013 Truman Scholar. Proudest accomplishment: True Aggie. Reach Briana at b.bowen@aggiemail.usu.edu.