Good Failures

Recently, I have found myself getting so caught up in all the bad in society and it becomes increasingly hard to find any good. Especially this past week with the election of Betsy Devos as the new secretary of education, and an uprising of a white supremacist group on campus. How can anyone striving for social change feel anything other than the overwhelming sensation that we’re all completely screwed? This is pretty much the Spark Notes version of how I felt this past week.

It actually took a conversation with my grandma that helped me remember a really important book I read in class last year titled Do it Anyway. 

First, the conversation with my grandma. She is subscribed to the National Geographic’s magazines, as I assume most people of that generation are, and recently received one about gender. After glancing at it and thinking “what is this”, giving it a quick browse she ended up throwing it in the trash. It wasn’t until later that day when she thought of me, her grand-daughter, the gender studies minor. It was after this thought that she went rummaging through her trash to find the magazine and pull it out. She told me that she is saving it for when I come home so I can explain it to her and my grandfather.

Now the book; Do it Anyway. It is about all the struggles worldwide and how activists in these towns, villages, and cities are combatting it. This book is incredibly empowering and I highly recommend it to all looking for an inspiring read.

It was actually the last chapter of this book that spoke to me the most. After hearing all the activists’ stories, author Courtney Martin explains how hearing these stories actually helped her come to the realization that failure, in most instances, is inevitable. She goes onto explain there are only the small victories or, as Martin calls it, “good failures”. As she so eloquently defines it “good failures are what you achieve when you aim to transform an entire broken system and end up healing one broken soul”.

Ultimately, I will fail to enlighten everyone I come in contact with on the oppressiveness of patriarchy in our society. That is an absolute fact. However, my grandmother pulling that magazine out of the trash with a desire to learn something from it is absolutely a victorious failure, which I am so incredibly proud of. To me this means if you keep talking eventually someone, not everyone, will listen. Someone will and perhaps that someone will be willing enough to learn from what you’re saying and then pass on what you teach them.