As Imperfect Advocates, We Keep Moving Forward

I just posted part of today’s blog on the Facebook page of one of my elected representatives to the Tennessee legislature.  The representative, along with some of his followers, recently criticized me for my vegan lifestyle and animal advocacy, in rather insulting terms.  One of them, Phillip, challenged me in such a way that I had to go back into student mode and do some studying.  I’ve been thinking about Phillip’s challenges and my responses the last few days.

I remembered a book I’ve used in my 1st-year writng classes, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, by Paul Rogat Loeb.  He has a chapter early in the book, “We Don’t Have to Be Saints.”  The point of the chapter is that we often think we must be a Gandhi/Martin Luther King/Rosa Parks/Mother Teresa to become actively involved in our world…but we don’t.  Even Gandhi et al. weren’t the super-human super-heroes we’ve created; they had their limitations.    Loeb writes that among our reasons for not taking a stand, lending a hand, working for change, fulfilling our responsibilities in our communities is that we’ve constructed a perfect standard that we think we must reach before we can be effective.

In my posting, I quoted Loeb:  “whatever the issue,…we never feel we have enough knowledge or standing.  If we do speak out, someone might challenge us, might find an error in our thinking or an inconsistency—what they might call a hypocrisy—in our lives….the perfect standard leaves us with a permanent insufficiency of knowledge—and a convenient way to dismiss anyone who dares take a public stand” (47).  I confessed in the post that Loeb describes me perfectly:  for a chunk of my younger life, I would never speak out, especially if my moral code or standpoint seemed to be different from that of the people in my sphere.

Even if I seemed in sync with my familiars, I’d keep silent because my expression of my beliefs/understanding might be incomprehensible or misinformed.  If I got involved in any kind of advocacy or service, it was in stealth mode, and I hid in the back to be as invisible as possible.  I wholly expected to be insufficient and thus dismissed…so I was best off just keeping quiet.  Loeb quotes spiritual writer Marianne Williamson:  “‘we have insidiously convinced ourselves that our wisdom is not wisdom, our common sense is not common sense, and our conscience is not conscience’” (47).  She’s right, at least about me.   

I also posted a more encouraging thought of Loeb’s:  “social change always proceeds one way or another…as long as people are willing to follow their convictions, to act despite their doubts, and to speak even at the risk of making mistakes,” and I used Loeb’s quote of philosopher/poet Rabindranath Tagore:  “‘If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out’” (49).  I think the point is that we’re all still on the journey; none of us is advocating or serving from that point of perfect wisdom, perfect knowledge, perfect consistency in all we say and do. 

We ARE going to screw it up, we ARE going to be challenged—sometimes, if not many times, rightfully so—we ARE going to be wrong in the facts, the interpretation, the details, the history, the reality… But if we’re not willing to be even dead wrong, then we’ll never move closer to Truth.  If we wait to speak, act, or serve until we’re perfect or perfectly ready to “go public,” we’ll remain indefinitely mute and inert.

Phillip’s challenge forced me to learn, then think seriously about what I was learning, to open myself to letting additional information revise my understanding, if not my standpoint.   Now Loeb warns that our quest for perfection can lead us to information overload:  “It’s also tempting to lose ourselves in endless information.  We can spend our lives trying to gather ever more facts and arguments from every conceivable Web site, blog, Facebook posting, or twenty-our-hour cable news source….As everything that can be known continues to increase, the effort to know everything grows increasingly doomed” (47). 

My Facebook post was a response to one of my representative’s supporters who posted that I should be unfriended for my liberal, Democratic, peace and pro-animal commentary, which generally runs counter to the standpoints and policies this conservative, Republican representative advocates.  But the point of my post had nothing to do with the divide separating us; I wanted to assure him that in fact I will likely be wrong, that my knowledge will always be partial…biased, and that because I’m still on my journey, I’ll likely never get it perfectly right. But regardless of our personal, invested standpoints, we have to keep learning and keep moving forward.

Yes, we must educate ourselves and be willing to continue learning, to acknowledge the holes in what we know or understand.  But we can’t beat ourselves up for our shortcomings.  We can’t withhold ourselves from speaking what we believe to be true or acting in the world according to our convictions, waiting until we feel informed enough or worthy enough.  And when the Phillips of our lives challenge us, rather than hitting our mute button, we need to actually be thankful for the opportunity to focus our continued learning and then using our new knowledge and understanding in productive ways.