Seventeen
It was June of 2002. I had just graduated from high school, and I was at an essay contest winners’ week sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, a small policy think tank of sorts, established by Congress twenty-five years ago to explore questions around peacebuilding and conflict resolution. I had submitted an essay the previous winter entitled, “American Peacekeeping: Duty or Folly?” (My essay, to be clear, argued the former.) Having been selected as the winner for the state of Florida, I’d come to Washington, along with my fellow state winners, to participate in a week filled with educational activities, including a three-day simulation exercise (in which I was to play then-CIA director George Tenet).
On our first full day in town, we had an introductory lecture from one Jeffrey Helsing, who I see is currently the deputy director of the Institute’s education program (and was back then, too, most likely). After a few initial remarks, Dr. Helsing asked us to pair up with the person sitting next to us for an old-fashioned thumb war (please, Wikipedia, do not delete this article). The rules were the usual; in addition, we had a time limit (something like a minute or two) in which we could play as many rounds as we could get in. The goal for each person, as you might expect, was to rack up as many points as possible.
I remember being paired with a guy named Will. We didn’t really know each other, so there was that uncomfortable tentativeness of a couple of boys who didn’t know exactly how hard we were supposed to be trying and didn’t want to be the one who tried too hard. Will was bigger than me, though, so I think he scored three or four points, while I managed only one.
After our time had expired, Dr. Helsing did the usual thing a moderator does to quickly get a sense of how an exercise went: he asked for a show of hands.
“Raise your hand if you got at least one point.”
Most hands went up.
“Okay, now keep your hands up if you had at least two points.”
Some hands dropped. Dr. Helsing continued.
“Three points? Four? Five? Six?”
Only a few hands remained, though I didn’t pay much attention to whose.
Dr. Helsing pointed at a particularly big fellow in the front and asked him, “how many points did you have?”
“Uh, eight.”
“Eight? Wow, you really went for it.” We all laughed.
“Okay, who else? What about you, young lady?”
A soft voice came from toward the back of the room.
“Seventeen.”
I turned in my chair.
“Seventeen?” Dr. Helsing repeated. “Seventeen??”
The girl, brown-haired and slight, certainly didn’t look like a thumb wrestling champion. She now had everyone’s full attention.
She looked sheepishly at her partner, looked back, and said simply:
“We both had seventeen.”
The room was silent. Dr. Helsing reiterated unnecessarily: “they both had seventeen.”
To be honest, I don’t remember any of the rest of the discussion. But, as trite as this sounds, I’ll never forget this moment. The truth is that the demonstration was, perhaps inadvertently, rigged; I later learned that this girl, Angela, was the daughter of a well-known (at least in this crowd) scholar in the field of international conflict resolution. So she had almost certainly seen this exercise many times before, and she knew exactly what to do and what the exercise was supposed to teach (though I never did ask her about it). And I imagine Dr. Helsing knew in advance that his little icebreaker would be even more illustrative than usual.
Despite these little cheats in the situation, I still find it a tremendously compelling lesson, even in retrospect. It shows how trapped we all are in our traditional modes of thought. Someone tells us to fight, and we fight, because that’s what we expect to do. If we just sat for a minute and thought about it, we’d realize there has to be a better way.
This is true for far more than thumb wrestling, and for far more than the international conflicts that the thumb wrestling was supposed to represent. We are perennial prisoners of our own assumptions. Every time we approach a task thinking we’ve done this same thing a thousand times, or meet a new person and think they’re just like people we already know, or have to make a decision and think we should just be consistent with a previous decision, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to do something new, to experience something exciting and different, to achieve something unexpected.
I learned something very important from Angela that day (and from her partner, too, who I presume readily accepted Angela’s recommendation rather than worry about what we were “supposed” to do). I learned that we humans are, despite our habitual slavishness to established norms, capable of remarkable ingenuity and strength of spirit. All we have to do is stop listening to ourselves long enough to actually listen to ourselves.