You have to be careful when you assess your own situation. Sometimes everyone else sees a problem and you don’t.
Proverbs 12:15 says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.”
My son provided a great example of that this week. We went to the home of some friends for an Ethiopian dinner. It was a great dinner and a fun night.
As we were getting ready to leave, Dawit came in with one of his friends who said Dawit got hurt. There were three boys, two scooters and a bicycle involved. We’ll never know exactly what happened, but you are probably running through the same scenarios I was.
Dawit was holding the back of his head and I asked him if he was okay.
He said he was but I wasn’t convinced.
“Does your head hurt? Are you nauseous? Are you dizzy?” I asked a little too quickly.
He said he was fine and went to walk away to resume playing as normal. That’s when his mother noticed his neck and hand were covered in blood.
When he fell backward and hit his head, he did a little damage. We had to clean him up and head back home.
We got him in the shower and let him rinse the blood out of his hair, but when he got ready for bed, his mom noticed that it hadn’t completely stopped bleeding.
My wife, not wanting his bed to look like a scene from “Criminal Minds” in the morning, asked me a question that hadn’t come up in our first 18 years of marriage.
“Do you have any gauze?” she asked.
What am I, an army medic? She remembered having a first aid kit in the car but, of course, there was no roll of gauze. She did find a square of gauze and folded a tissue to help. Then she proceeded to wrap Scotch tape around Dawit’s head twice. He looked like a modern day cover of Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage.”
However, as funny as it looked, at least he didn’t bleed all over his bed.
As fun as dealing with injured children can be, was that story really worth retelling?
I think there is a moral to the story that might apply to this year’s presidential election.
Hillary Clinton reminds me a lot of Dawit. Like the cut on the back of his head — a lot of her problems are behind her and she doesn’t seem to see the full effect. Emails, meetings and attacks all happened while she was Secretary of State, so she wants to believe that she is fine.
She can’t seem to see that there is a problem. She can’t see the damage that others with a better perspective can.
I don’t know which of her advisers is telling her not to be concerned about erased or hidden emails, but she needs to fire them. This is not a minor problem, but if she faced it head on, took responsibility and said what she would do differently as president, I think voters would move on. Trying to convince people that national security being shared, or saved, on a hackable private email server is no big deal won’t work.
Her ties to the Clinton Foundation are also a major problem. Even if your heart is in the right place, and you would never do what it looks like you did, the appearance of impropriety cheapens her work with both the foundation and as the nation’s top diplomat.
How much hubris did it take for her and former President Bill Clinton to maintain ties and interest in the foundation while she held the title of Secretary of State or began her run for president?
They could have easily divested their interests in the organization, allowed someone else to continue to use the money to do the work they intended the foundation to do.
This is not the time to work for a foundation. Your other roles don’t allow it.
Both candidates are truly lucky to have each other this year. Without Donald Trump, Clinton would be the least popular major party candidate in the history of American politics. Without Clinton, Trump wouldn’t even be as close as he is.
I would say history wouldn’t remember this campaign well.
However, it seems like this race is just another data point on a trend line that shows how broken our electoral system is.
Contact Kent Bush, publisher of the Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star, at kent.bush@news-star.com.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: BUSH: Clinton can’t see her actions’ damage