The Wishbone Fallacy

Thanksgiving is over. The turkey soup is in the pot. The carcass bones are in the trash, having surrendered their healing goodness in yesterday's roasting.

In the process of dividing soup from bones I came across the clavicle, the wishbone. It occurs to me what a childish game this is.

When we were children we would remove the wishbone and set it on the window sill to dry. In a couple of days our mother, tired of looking at it and cleaning around it, would remind us of our duty to make a wish and break the bone, divining whose wish might prevail. The holder of the larger part would win the game. That wish was made good. The loser's wish was dashed, and the subject was changed.

Maybe because all the other children were much older than I, maybe because a stoic turn of mind made me suspicious of wishes in general, or that the natural gloom in my Michigan bred soul had me convinced that, even unopposed, my wish was doomed from the start. I never liked the game.

Now looking back I can see why. The wishbone game is based on a fallacy. In the game there can be only one winner. It is a zero sum proposition. Your win is necessarily my loss, and there are after all, only a finite number of wishes that might be granted in the world. Happily-ever-afters are in critically limited supply.

In larger families the situation is even worse. The wishbone has only two legs. Third, fourth, and fifth children are even deprived the wishing. They must, like so many second and third world nations stand by while titans battle for wish supremacy.

I make too much of a child's game.

But fables and nursery rhymes make their way into the psyche. Indeed that is their role, to plant values early and deep. The diligent ant, the wily fox, and the greedy dog all argue persuasively. And so we have a need to reflect. Do we believe in the zero sum game? Is one's victory necessarily another's loss? Are the good things in the world in scarcity or abundant supply?

Either this or that, tit for tat, quid pro quo, the dichotomy emerges again and again throughout life. Are there really only two political parties? Are there truly only right wing and left? Why does every dilemma have only two horns? In the news in recent days is talk of net neutrality, that every view must be balanced by its opposite. What if there is no opposite? 

Are climate change and globalization true opposites? What about wealth? No one posits a pluralistic view where A and B and C and D are all true, all at once, and in dynamic relationship one to the others. How often do we let complex issues boil down to either this or that? Or if not this or that, they somewhere on the line between them. When will we learn that the best solution is often off the line altogether?

So we return once again to the wishbone fallacy. There it sits on the window sill. Desiccating. Inviting the wish. Taunting the dream. Holding forth both promise and betrayal, blessing and cursing. And in the very process blinding us to the truth. The truth that yesterday we were family. Yesterday there was food and music and conversation. Yesterday there was Thanksgiving, and thankfulness, and a turkey. Don't you wish it could stay?