Hillary Clinton may have lost the election but we’re learning more from her in defeat than we are from Donald Trump in victory. Winning is easy, losing is hard and Hillary’s honesty about that is refreshing.
Speaking for the first time since her concession speech last week she has been upfront about her disappointment at the election outcome. Last night she spoke at a charity event about how she had wanted to ‘curl up with a good book and never leave the house again’.
‘Now I will admit coming here tonight wasn’t the easiest thing for me’, she said. ‘I know many of you are deeply disappointed about the results of the election. I am too, more than I can ever express.’
‘I know this isn’t easy. I know that over the past week a lot of people have asked themselves whether America is the country we thought it was.’
‘America is worth it. Our children are worth it. Believe in our country, fight for our values and never, ever give up.’
We’re taught from a young age that we must respond to knocks, failures and setbacks by ‘bouncing back’, ‘building a bridge and getting over it’ and ‘getting right back on the horse’. This is useful advice but it’s also OK not to be OK. Sometimes you don’t get your way, sometimes you get broken up with, sometimes you don’t get the job you really wanted and you can’t always get right back up again and carry on like it doesn’t matter.
Ploughing on regardless like an android with no feelings, letting failure and criticism slide off of you like water from a duck’s back never helped anyone learn, grow or develop as a sentient being. How can you move forwards if you don’t reflect and reassess after a fall? A short period of reflection (call it wallowing if you will) when things don’t go your way might just mean you don’t make the same mistakes again.
Contrast Hillary’s behaviour with Piers Morgan, self-styled ‘voice of reason’ and his brash dismissal of people are upset because they don’t agree with him and his ‘friend’ Donald. In a Daily Mail column snappily titled ‘memo to millennials, that awful feeling you’ve got is called losing. It happens. If you want to know how to win, stop whinging for a bit and learn some lessons from Trump’, he accuses young people who are taking stock of Hillary’s defeat and, more importantly, what it represents of whingeing.
Piers Morgan is, as usual, baiting-millennials in an attempt to get internet famous so he can stay relevant. All Piers Morgan cares about is making Piers Morgan, his own personal brand, happen and he hasn’t got anything better to offer than the odd column which intentionally winds people up ‘for the clicks’.
That’s right guys, according to Piers Morgan we all need to ‘get a grip’ and stop huddling in ‘Starbucks over [our] Venti Iced White Chocolate Mochas’ because a ‘winner’ has risen to the White House in our ‘PC-crazed universe’. As with Brexit old heteronormative men are trying to dismiss entire the views of an entire generation as opposed to reflecting on the societal and political changes which are so clearly taking place.
Memo to Piers Morgan: nobody goes to Starbucks these days, duh, it’s all about independent artisanal slow coffee mate.
Piers may have had his narrow minded world view reinforced by his ‘friend’ Donald Trump’s election win but for millennials, who hold a very different world view to his pampered bunch of Generation Xers, it is unsettling. Morgan might be hoping from foot to foot on the spot with glee at the prospect of a return to the gold-plated 1980s in the grossly macho shape of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, but we aren’t and that’s really very reasonable.
Does Piers Morgan really think we should all take lessons in 'how to win' from Trump, a man who threatened to contest the result of the election if he lost the electoral colleges but won the public vote as Hillary did?What a role model.
We can all learn from Hillary’s sincere admissions in defeat. It’s OK not to be OK. It’s OK to mourn, grieve, reflect and recover when you suffer a serious setback, whether that’s in your personal or professional life. By the same logic, when your world view is challenged is by a man who campaigned on objectively racist, xenophobic and misogynistic sentiments become President-elect of the United States, it’s reasonable to ask questions, whether that’s on social media or via protest. It’s through questioning and conversation that we make sense of the world around us, take stock of events and work out how to move forwards.
For so long public life has been dominated by men and ‘emotion’ has not been an acceptable public discourse. Rarely do men speak about being ‘hurt’ when something goes wrong; when men do show emotion in public they are ridiculed. Remember when Obama cried during a speech on gun control and the right wing press accused him of faking it? When women show emotion they are ‘hysterical’ and ‘irrational’ or, in Hillary’s case, dismissed as a ‘sore loser.’
Hillary didn’t just lose a very important and very public election, on a personal level she missed out on the biggest job of her entire life. An emotional response to those circumstances is more than reasonable. Her candour is refreshing (and, let’s face it, somewhat unexpected). Let’s hope it becomes more commonplace, if you're going to lose do it like Hillary.
You’d think someone who’s messed up as many times as Piers Morganwould have a bit more empathy.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.