Prologue
Every benchmark, every job, every life experience can teach you something. Sometimes the lessons are gentle. Other times they're jammed down your throat with a vengeance. Many lessons learned still apply years later and can once again rear their ugly heads. Often they can combine together in one vicious experience. That's what happened to me.
I've learned that you can't please everyone. My parents taught me that pretty early in life. There was simply no way to make everyone happy. It's flat out impossible. You're more likely in life to make everyone unhappy. That was the basic premise behind compromise after all.
Add to that lesson the one that anger over something can explode out of proportion or any kind of rationalization. I learned that one from a student and her parents at UVA. No matter how much I explained that a family yacht party over the weekend was not a valid excuse for not completing a paper and that I wouldn't offer an extension simply so a student could have a free weekend to party, they wouldn't take no for an answer. It almost turned into a knock out, blow up fight. In the end they had the pleasure of being escorted off campus by security. There was nothing I could have said or done to change their response. There was no rationality involved in that discussion, and nothing I could have done would have brought any into it. Anger often didn't leave room for rationality or logical reasoning.
The last lesson that came into play in one single moment was that there's almost always a scapegoat, and a person who has little to do with a problem can become the one punished for it regardless. That one I learned as Secretary of State. No, it wasn't from Russell Jackson. I only got the introduction from him. That lesson hit me with brutal clarity thanks to Estevan Sanchez.
That was a lesson that wasn't simply taught to me. My family received a crash course lesson as well. They didn't want their lesson any more than I'd wanted mine. It was bad enough that I had to learn it. Seeing Henry and my children experience that lesson so brutally was even worse.
Sanchez did more than simply teach us unwanted lessons though. He completely changed all of our lives and almost took mine in the process.
- Elizabeth McCord