My ten year old, Noah, is rather emotional. He loves to argue. Not to be mean, but because he seems to have an overactive “sense of right and wrong and fair play” according to one of his recent parent teacher conferences. Its a very accurate description. If you are playing a game with him, or other organized activities, he can be difficult because he will get very emotional and worked up about the rules, often bringing himself to tears in the process.
He brings himself to tears quite a lot, really. If you scold him, he wants to argue his defense so vigorously, often when he is totally in the wrong. I usually try to cut him off before he does more damage to himself (or to my blood pressure, I am not going to live forever at this rate) and he just. can’t. stop. He just has to try to keep explaining why it happened, taking you down a long and winding road, usually in a direction away from the “scene of the crime”. When you try to take him back to point, focus on the issue at hand, or just end the discussion, he only gets more emotional, more animated in his defense, usually to the point of tears.
He usually storms away in tears, red faced, angry, no – outraged, that all along he was JUST TRYING TO TELL THE TRUTH! He is so righteously indignant that I almost feel sorry for him. I mean, there is always a kernel of truth in what he is arguing. And he just clings to that truth SO HARD. He just won’t let go, instead he focuses in like a laser on some crumb of injustice, whether specifically related to the origins of the argument or not.
You see, that is the trick. That is what makes his argument so defensible in his mind and why he gets so emotionally invested in his position. He begins by getting caught, red handed, for some infraction of the rules of the game. He has a small window of opportunity, a moment in time, right then, but it’s ever so fleeting. A moment in time to simply capitulate, shrug his shoulders, hang his head for a moment, and accept it. We would all hug and move on and in a short span of time it would all be forgiven. We would all just let go, because we were not that emotionally invested in the argument.
Instead, due to the life lessons he has not yet learned at ten years old, he always feels he can defend himself and argue his way out of it. He starts explaining why it happened and I counter with why shouldn’t have done it, and he instinctively searches for the high ground, an island of dry land in an ocean of guilt. Soon we are arguing about something only peripherally related to the original infraction because he has crafted a sound argument, based up his kernel of unrelated truth, his island in the sea.
Run to the truth. Cling to the high ground. Dig your fortifications. Hold out. Focus on the truth, and deflect attention from the fault. Of course, the trap is that on such hard fought ground one cannot easily yield. Instead, one is compelled to hang on till the last. Till the bloody end.
In Noah’s case, the end is usually an early retirement to his room to sleep it off.
I reflected on this last night, in frustration at yet another senseless, avoidable argument in which he had lost all grasp context and was an emotional mess, honestly believing he was completely faultless and now being WRONGED BY THE SYSTEM! Clinging to his little kernel of truth. Living on his island.
This morning, I read Alberto Contador’s reaction to being cleared for alleged PED use. He revealed, in essence, that he had stomped his feet and argued until he literally had cried himself to sleep.
“The fault is with the institutions that haven’t served their purpose and who haven’t been able to review a case like this. It’s been six months of sleepless nights, pulling your hair out — there are times when I cried.”
Given my parental insight into such emotional arguments, I can understand the sincerety of many of these athletes charged with doping. I can see that fleeting moment when they found themselves running to their truth, found their high ground, built their defenses. Soon the defense of their island becomes so all encompassing that they forget what is too often revealed to be the real truth – that they doped.
“… all that matters is that you recognise that you have done nothing, …there was such a great injustice that I had to fight.”
They get so lost in the process of the argument, on what they can defend, maintaining their sanity by focusing on what they didn’t do. They find fault in the system, and point well taken, it is flawed. They redefine the argument around their truth, and they garner sympathy for their treatment.
Later of course it is often all revealed. The Kimmage interview with Landis gave a remarkable insight into the process of circling the wagons and the loss of touch with reality that seems to trap so many of these athletes. They spend millions of dollars defending their truth, when in reality they are in the wrong argument, the one they created in their mind to deal with what must be a sickening realization of being caught. The one they can win. The one in which they are on the side of THE TRUTH. They lose sight of the overriding truth that they are guilty, and now they are caught.
One can only hope that they read. That they read interviews like the one Landis gave, like the one I sincerely hope Tyler Hamilton will give one day, the that even Richard Virenque ultimately gave. The same one that Lance Armstrong will never give. Hope that they learn from those before them of the futility and inevitably, the greater damage to their lives and their relationships that will result from running from the one truth towards the another.
Or hope that they have kids.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Paul Boudreau and Christopher Plummer, colinr. colinr said: This is way too good to be the work of @closethedoor: The Truth Behind Children and Dopers: http://t.co/ILSEO1v [...]
Aren’t you leaving out that in both cases, the accusers and the jury are one in the same, and thus the outcome of the process is rigged from the start?
I AM THE LAW. But I am a benevolent dictator, so its all good.
Excellent post. The truth can mean such different things to different people, based on personal perspective. I trust though, that most are drawn to some core of truth regardless of the reality of the outer layers and that those who totally abandon any truth at all are very few.
Noah did what he did because he felt action X was right. What he didn’t, and sounds reluctant to realize is that action X had consequence Y and Z and that at least parts of those consequences, may be wrong. It’s a tough line for an adult let alone a 10 year old to grapple with.
Let’s look at your posit of ‘getting lost in the argument’.
People who would rather see the the entire sport of cycling burn down suddenly come running to the defense of landis based on some alleged new found credibility.
Why?
Because he’s telling them what they want to hear. For his part, this is nothing more than a revenge tactic for getting slighted from the ’09 tour of california, and Kimmage and all the lance-haters have all gotten sucked into his subterfuge.
The thing people now lying prostrate at the new Alter of Landis keep forgetting is that he’s still playing the vicitm. He’ s making specious allegations of participating in a mass doping program under Brunyeel, he’s lashing out at he perceives have wronged him, and invited those zealots to rally around his newly adopted cause célèbre.
Face it Jerry, we wouldn’t have heard from landis if he had been allowed to race in the TOC. If they had simply let him enter his team, he would have kept quiet.
That should tell you something.
1) Landis is not above blackmail – but then should we be surprised since he duped over $1M from his fans?
2) He issued the threat to TOC and armstrong before he did it. They were aware of what he was intending. If the culture of corruption surrounding armstrong is as vast as landis alledges, how hard could it have been to coerce the TOC to let landis race? Unless of course, they already knew landis was completely full of shit.
So landis has not only gotten lost in the argument, he has in fact created a completely new argument to deflect his own wrongdoing, and managed to create the culture of personality around himself that was lost after he was stripped of his tour title.
It’s up to us parents to hold the firm line with our children, and not let a temper tantrum or a politic of distraction divert us from the real issue at hand – that our child did something wrong and needs to be held accountable. If we do, it’s our own goddam fault and our kids will become little psychopaths who blame everyone else for their actions.
It’s up to us as rational adults and fans of cycling not to let the landis suck us into a vortex of revenge and hatred. If we let the likes of him dictate the rules of the game, many innocent riders will get hurt along the way, and landis won’t give a flying fuck as long as he has his little cadre of zealots cheering by his side.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you said, unless you are implying that he didn’t actually dope at all and is making THAT up too. That would be something!
However, point was not whether I believe all of Landis’s post confession allegations, I agree he has little credibility. I think the “dishing” part of his interview is of little value here. It’s is sour grapes, yes.
The lesson from his story is that in the instant he denied doping that day in the tour (and if I recall correctly, he continues to deny, still blaming the lab for bad science), in that instant that he chose to go down that path he set in motion a series of events that inevitably led to losing everything he had.
He, like Tyler Hamilton, by choosing to defend the lie, lost all their money, lost their wives, their best friend, many close friends, their personal credibility, and even their sanity and mental health. Look at Jan Ulrich. His life is, or was, in shambles. Look at Frank VDB. Pantani. That kind of public humiliation and public scrutiny can crush the strongest mind. Better to own it. To accept it, to accept the punishment, and to rebuild your life with some shred of credibility, rather than dig the hole deeper, making it that much harder to climb out of.
What took place with Landis recently is really unrelated to what I was speaking to, and in fact is just further fall out from that initial decision.
They chose to deny, and then they are forced to rationalize and “drink their own cool aid” to keep a handle on their sanity. And it never works out. It always leads to ruin. That is the story that other pro athletes in that moment should read, should be aware of.
That is the lesson that I am trying, quite unsuccessfully, to teach to my kids. Own up to your mistakes, learn from them, and earn my respect by having the courage and integrity to admit fault.
J
Best post of the entire off season in the New England blogosphere, maybe ever. Really well done, comments included.
JB