Part of my morning routine is checking the headlines and delving into the news. In my adult life I’ve always found it important to know when/how the world is changing around me. Sometimes I chalk it up to my military training: Always maintain “situational awareness!” (or maybe I’m just nosy). Before the sun rises, I log onto a couple local/national/international news websites and see what is currently captivating the world. For me, gone are the days of retrieving the newspaper from the driveway, although my neighbor still gets his delivered punctually at 0530 every weekday morning.
One of my cherished memories as a young child is sitting on my grandparents’ living room floor on Sunday nights, watching the evening news and absorbing the commentary coming from them. My grandfather was a medical doctor. My grandmother reared 11 kids. I would consider them “experts” in their fields. Grandfather: Internal Medicine. Grandmother: Mother Extraordinaire (read: child psychologist). Their shared wisdom and perspectives are important to me. My grandfather would sit in his recliner with the Sunday newspaper open, listening rather than watching the news on the television, and would fire comments across the room about the different topics being presented. My grandmother would either take him to task on that particular point or agree with his position from a different angle. I really appreciated both my grandparents’ candor in their observations and their reluctance to let untruths persist. My aunts and uncles would sometimes join the conversation, testing theories or leaving an observation.
The open and honest forum was wonderful. Enlightening conversations aimed at finding truth in the world. Current events, politics, education, sports . . . nothing was taboo. Quite the array of topics and observations.
Truth. Objective Truth. My grandparents would carve away at each other’s and their kids’ subjective truths attempting to find the truth. Not a truth, but The Truth. Throughout history, the human species has had high and low points when acknowledging obvious truths. There is a reason we call the Dark Ages “dark” and why we have had periods of “enlightenment”. Most modern governments are built on common knowledge and a fact-based view of the world. Thomas Jefferson spoke about truth when he penned the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
What a bold statement for his time. Then, in many minds, royals were loudly proclaimed worth more than a lord, much less a serf or a slave. Our nation’s founding fathers were breaking literally 1000s of years of tradition/mind frame to proclaim that all people were created equal and declaring that that truth was obvious.
Self-evident. As in, “on their face” and “plain to see”. Not fractured truth like light through a prism. The whole truth with the full diversity of the light spectrum all seen together. If we start taking away different colors from the spectrum, we don’t see the entire picture. We see a distorted view of reality. All colors work together to give us the clearest picture.
It appears, as of late, our culture is fracturing. Just like light does when it goes through a prism. People make claims that their subjective truths should be seen the same as real truth/reality. A general lack of discernment is required for partial truths (or untruths) to be accepted as “truth.” A suspension of reality must occur for people to live in their own disparate/fractured subjective truths. The rainbow displayed by a prism-fractured light can be beautiful, but the prism is not a lens that we can use to look through and see reality in its entirety. All colors must be let through for us to see truth in its fullest. It appears that our society has attempted to use the light-separating prism as a lens. All that does is fracture us into tribes.
This is dangerous.
Some may ask why I feel the need to call out this tribalism. Let me quote a great thinker and leader who was attempting to unite the U.S. not that long ago: “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider.” – Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, 1963 in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
I like how Dr. King describes the commonality. For us to be “on the inside” and not outsiders, we all must subscribe to some common core tenants of reality. For us to see complete truth, we must have Every Color of the rainbow present, otherwise we don’t see truth with the entire spectrum. If I only see in red, then I’m not seeing a complete picture. If I only reflect blue, then I’m not grasping all of reality.
Calls for acceptance of “my truth” over The Truth are explicitly doing that.
When I lived in Hawaii, one of the tourists adventures I enjoyed taking visitors on was a submarine adventure. We would all sit inside a submarine that had big windows looking out so we could see the reef and fish in all their splendor. As
you took your place on the sub, the guide would hand out cards with a color wheel with the colors labeled. As we descended the 40-50 feet into the ocean, the colors would all turn a shade of green-gray.
The ocean water acts as a filter for wave-lengths of light. Even the colorful fish and corals did not look colorful until the submarine turned on flood lights, thereby giving the full spectrum of light. It was amazing to see the drab fish and coral erupt into their true colors with the full-spectrum light shown on them.
When people only accept their connotation of reality and not true reality, they are looking through a filtered lens and not looking with the full diversity of light. Only choosing to see “their truth” is Wokeism. It is a dividing ideology that moves people to fanatic practices. Wokeism and Critical Theory are tools of the Marxist that intentionally create feelings of being an “outsider” and the intended purpose is to instigate revolution. Like Dr. King said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
That connectedness can nurture greatness when reality is embraced. If reality is ignored it will foster fractioning.
I believe we the citizens of the U.S. are smart enough and strong enough to expel these untruths presented by Wokeism. I believe we can overcome the cynicism and isolation that Wokeism attempts to insert into our ethos. Like my early days of observing family discourse aimed at finding pure truth, we can all learn how to be openly and honestly curious about the realities of our world and voyage together towards a great future based on self-evident truth.
United We Stand.
Jamie Ruehl is an occasional columnist for the NKyTribune. He is an Army veteran, has been a law enforcement officer and is now a staff insurance adjuster with a large carrier headquartered in Cincinnati. He and his wife live with their three children in Edgewood.