It’s natural to pluck a nerve when someone posing as an expert gets something wrong. It proves they don’t know the subject. It’s like they’re writing a review for a book they haven’t read.
I live in Monterey County where fog is thick as pea soup. A reviewer from the UK once introduced a novel I wrote as “taking place on California’s sunshine coast.” Funny thing was, the fog was present in every chapter—practically its own character.
You get the picture. He hadn’t. The truth gets lost.
But life’s too short to feel irritated over human foibles, right? To err is human. That’s a beautiful phrase, when you really think about it. (It’s one reason I’ve resigned as a public spelling monitor.)
But what if the error is a George Santos level con-fab? That kind breaks my heart. It makes me ask, “What have we become?”
Everyone born has been wounded. We understand this. We also tend to believe that to forgive is divine. It usually comes from a place of empathy, no? People used to say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” sometimes with nauseating arrogance, but also sometimes with sincere humility and a sense of being one.
Can we delineate between absolution and accountability?
Chiron is the wounded healer of Greek mythology. He shows up in horoscopes because his constellation is the centaur. A simple Google search shows hundreds of pictures of centaurs labeled as Chiron, but they all have the body of a horse and the torso of a man. Even the movie Percy Jackson has the character of Chiron looking like this.
There’s one problem though. That’s not Chiron. Pardon me while I pull my hair and scream, “Didn’t anyone read the story?”
In Chiron’s origin myth, he doesn’t fit in with the other centaurs. He’s rejected by them because his body is not a full horse as theirs are. His front legs are human. Chiron’s story is a bit like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. All of the others used to laugh and call him names. He was even ejected by his mother at birth for being so hideous. He was not the gorgeous creature depicted in marble.
But they made him pretty when the whole point is that he's not. Forgive me; let that sink in.
So, what happened to this different one who some would call freak? He was abandoned. But then, his story turns into a “found family” when the god Apollo fosters Chiron and, with his sister Artemis, raises him to become cultured, kind, and committed to peace. He became the father of modern pharmacology and surgery.