A Quest to Question

"This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly...

The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you...

I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’ and that’s enough...

Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’

That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do."

―Former U.S. President Barack Obama

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Dear Kate,

"Woke" is a term that refers to a person being aware of, alert to social issues that concern justice.

The battle-cry goes like this: "We've been given wrong answers for long enough; it is our turn!"

To do what?  What's left unsaid speaks about the heart.

If the person is intractably dishonest, he would say, "It's our turn to give the right answers!"  Smash the statues of old!  Topple everything before us!  Burn the books, the Bible, Shakespeare, everything, all them controlling narratives imposed on us by authoritarians, males (and females, being necessarily controlled by males back then), and start anew, today, right here, on my mobile device!  The person might not acknowledge who's paying her phone bill (and likely everything else) or who climbed up a cell tower in the deep of a winter storm to help her stay "woke," or how the way she speaks speaks about a linguistic tradition without which she couldn't speak this way or any other way at all, but since she is right and everyone else is wrong, the prerogative is justified.

If the person is half-honest, he would probably say, "It's our turn to give a new version of the same wrong answers, but give we must for the benefit of ourselves."  Clear-eyed cynicism has its charm.

If one is to change only one word in the statement, a new world of possibility can become available.  How about to question the zebra vision of seeing only black and white, Left or Right, and replace the word "wrong" with "insufficient"?

Insufficient, your answers, and mine, any answer, ever given.

But how is one to live with that, the insufficiency, the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the paradoxes of life?  Who can wrestle with all these and still stay purpose-driven, productive, and, most of all, prosperous in this world of scarce resources and competing narratives?

So at the end, it's still about control, isn't it?  To question our own views is to question our own motives, to come to terms with human nature, who we truly are.  But can we afford that?  Can we afford to lose the control of our own story and give "the other side" the opportunity to control us with theirs?

All the perennial "political" questions I shared with you yesterday are fundamental human questions.  No politician would ever want you to ask them.  No politician would ever want you to question them.  (I hope you didn't miss my play on ambiguous pronouns.)  If we say we cannot afford to ask them, can we also ask if we can afford to not ask them?

I don't plan to keep writing about this.  I plan to write about something else tomorrow, God willing.  But you should know by now how I see the vocation of a writer.  We are on a quest, to question, to look up from the foot of the Cross, not to pin God down.  It is a most dignifying, exhilarating human vocation, to open oneself to God every new morning.  That's why, as busy and stressful as my life and career are, I can't afford to stop this quest. 

Yours, Alex