The November 8th election bestowed upon this country a new president, Donald Trump. The nature of politics is that there will always be a winner and a loser. Hillary Clinton, for all it’s worth, had made mistakes in the past that has put national security in jeopardy and those very mistakes have come back to haunt her in this recent election. If the tragedy in Benghazi or Clinton’s email scandal taught us anything, it is that mistakes become our vulnerabilities and has future repercussions in ways we sometimes cannot imagine. But perhaps there is a silver lining to mistakes.

A week following the election, I partook in a baseball game in Yucaipa High School. Located near the outskirts of San Bernardino, I saw nothing but vegetation and mountains which, ironically, made for the nicest baseball field I’ve seen in Southern California. As a growing teenager, I am a student athlete from Jserra Catholic High School that plays and loves watching baseball. Yucaipa was a talented team and it was a challenge to play them; our team was mostly composed of freshmen to sophomores but Yucaipa had mostly upperclassmen and members of the junior varsity team.

I started the game as a catcher. Not to be biased, but catcher is most important position in a baseball diamond. Catcher make spontaneous decisions that impacts the whole field and the fielders have to play based on those actions. The game we played that afternoon was very close until the sixth inning when the Yucaipa player hit a homerun against us. Just like that, we were down two runs. Bottom of the ninth, the situation was identical to that of the final baseball game of 2008 Beijing Olympic. If you are a Korean baseball fan, you probably remember this moment. Bases were loaded with 1 out. One of the best hitter hit a ground ball into a double play and as disappointment shook our team, all of us were frustrated by the anticlimactic finish to the game. I’m sure everyone knew their mistakes, including me, and every game we played, we played to improve on the previous week’s mistakes.

Life’s zero-sum nature implies that when there is a winner, there is a loser. I want to let people know that even though we lose sometimes, it does not mean anything. Winning could have implications that are far worse than losing in the long run.

<Jisoo Ku JSerra Catholic High 9th Grade>