Everybody Knows

Is American Healing Even Possible? is an interview with one Reverend William J. Barber II of Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The Atlantic's Adam Harris interviewed him to talk about, well, healing. In this case, "healing the soul of the nation."

Honestly, I sort of lost interest in the whole "healing" thing. Possibly because I've heard it a million times already, and am fairly convinced that it isn't going to happen. What did pique my interest was the subject of talking to people. Or, more precisely, telling them things. Before the actual interview section of the piece, Mr. Harris notes a speech by Vice President Pence that references the idea that there was widespread fraud afoot in the election. When Mr. Harris asks Reverend Barber about this, the reply was: “They have been sold a bill of goods that their way of life is being threatened by the others.” Not long after, in the interview proper, Reverend Barber says of Ezekiel: "There’s a scripture in Ezekiel where God says to Ezekiel, 'I need you to tell the nation the truth.' And they may not hear you, because they are stiff-necked people. But at least they will know there has been a prophet among them."

The thought that immediately crossed my mind was: And the obvious difference between Vice President Pence and Ezekiel is what, exactly? Why should it have been clear, or even simply a suspicion, to the people cheering the Vice President that they'd been sold a bill of goods, or to the Jews of antiquity that Ezekiel had some sort of special relationship to the divine? These things are generally presented as being the results of foolishness and/or willfulness, but the fact of the matter remains that human beings were not given any special faculties to discern truth from fiction. Otherwise, Eve would have caught on to the serpent. But more importantly, people wouldn't be willing to sincerely go to the mat for as many things as they do, because they would understand them to be false.

As an outsider, or simply reading a document after a couple thousand years, it's easy to decide what's true, and what's false. But I suspect that it's a lot more difficult on the ground, and in the moment. It's all a matter of faith, and what people place theirs in. And in a lot of ways, faith is nothing more than guessing. When prophecy is self-evidently correct, that usually means that the outcome is so clear that it's no longer prophecy; it's simply extrapolating current events. And when falsehoods are so transparent that they're impossible to believe, they cease to really be falsehoods. I understand the impulse to forget those things; but sometimes, I wonder if people do so more easily than circumstances warrant.