The Final Fight
voices want to sing
You’re wrong. I don’t know what you’re wrong about, necessarily, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are wrong about something. You need to embrace the fact that you’re not right about everything, and sometimes you’re wrong about things that you had no idea you could be wrong about.
Maybe you’re wrong about your political opinion, your sports team, your taste in music or movies or media. It could be anything, but part of the human condition means being wrong about something. That’s a face that is largely lost on us because it seems natural to believe that we are never wrong about anything and it’s everyone else who is the problem.
And that’s the actual problem: even if you’re right about something, you can still be viewed as subjectively wrong in the eyes of somebody else. That’s just how it goes.
Isn’t that one of the strangest realizations to grapple with? That there is a strong chance you will have a conversation with somebody and when you leave, they will turn to somebody else and say, “Wow, can you believe they said that?”
It isn’t limited to in-person conversations, oh absolutely not. In fact, it seems the longer we live with the internet, the central focus of discourse online is built around the idea that we are supposed to disagree. We get online to blame older generations for not setting a good enough stage for us when we step into the spotlight, then we’re supposed to criticize younger generations for not doing things the way we did them. We get online to claim that people who don’t share our worldview are missing the point, but also that those who do share our worldview don’t share it well enough.
Naturally, they say the same thing about us.
I first drafted this post, this entire of thought, during the hottest moments of turmoil occurring in Minneapolis, when the country seemed to be on the breaking point. That seems like a lifetime ago, with a lifetime’s worth of breaking points having occurred ever since. Fingers have been pointed in every possible direction, faster than ever before, and I’m not entirely sure anyone can even keep up with who they are “supposed” to blame anymore.
I think it was important that I wrote that initial draft and left it for a while, because sensitive subjects rarely benefit from rash response. I process life alongside music, including a grappling with difficult situations like we’ve seen across our country and world, and for years I have been hooked on the bouncy, catchy, upbeat melody of Harmony Hall by Vampire Weekend. It’s a song whose tone doesn’t match up with its shockingly poignant and heart-wrenching lyrics. I’ve truly never heard a more poetic explanation of how quickly outrage spreads than what they wrote:
Anger wants a voice
Voices want to sing
Singers harmonize
Until they can’t hear anything
Recently, I saw an acquaintance on social media write about “the philosophy of despair” that is so prevalent all across the spectrum of our lives. He wrote about how every side of the political compass uses despair to move and motivate people because anger and despair multiplies like a virus and spreads unbelievably fast. The old adage is that “sex sells” but we’ve since discovered that outrage and rage bait sells much, much better and is a more generally accepted currency.
It was once said that the love of money was the root of all kinds of evil. Once that evil takes root, though, does the money even matter anymore? When our currency of choice is anger, how do we spend it?
And how do we fight it?
Since that first draft of this post months ago, my hero passed away. He was in his 90s, so he lived a very long life. It, like the life that many of us will experience, was full of good and bad moments. But for him, it was also full of mission.
John Perkins lived through a lot. I won’t try to sum up his life story here, because there’s no way I can write about racial unrest, brutality, salvation and reconciliation quite as well as he did, so you should just buy his books and read them instead. Start with Let Justice Roll Down.
Dr. Perkins lived in my city, little broken down Jackson, Mississippi, even though he had escaped and looked for a better life elsewhere. It’s because he eventually learned that a “better life” doesn’t just mean a safer life. It means investing in life in such a way that you can give others a better life. A “better life” sometimes looks like a life in a place that doesn’t offer you security and entertainment, but rather offers you a chance at improving the world around you. A better life isn’t full of outrage and finger pointing, but is full of love and mess and investment.
There’s a fatigue that comes with living this way. It’s exhausting to live in a world that needs help, but we have to do it. I think that’s why it’s easy for us to be so outraged at the world, because we are tired of its brokenness. We want to fight somebody that we think is to blame for the brokenness, forgetting that the brokenness is what we need to fight against. And the only way to do that, as Dr. Perkins was so apt to saying, was through love.
Our fight was not against each other. Love is the final fight.
I am hopeful because all reconciliation begins with the recognition of brokenness, and we see the evidence of our brokenness laid bare in our news and communities every day.
We have grace, justification, and full redemption, and because of those gifts of God in Christ Jesus, we can find in ourselves the forgiveness, love, and welcome that we need to offer each other. Jesus told his friends that people would know they were his disciples if they loved one another (John 13:35). Our love is our witness. Love is the final fight.
There’s a million life lessons that I could take from these past several months, and truthfully since I the first draft of this post I have debated where it could even land. I still don’t know how to wrap this up even now, so I apologize for the somewhat clumsy connection of thoughts throughout this entire post. In my mind, these thoughts have to be tied together: anger and love and brokenness and reconciliation.
I may not know where this all goes, but what I do know is that I have benefited greatly from not rushing into a conclusion as I wrote this. It’s not because I wanted to avoid a “wrong” conclusion, but because ultimately I think any “conclusion” would have been wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. People recover from making the wrong choice or having the wrong opinion all the time. Recognizing that being wrong, messing up, or making mistakes are all universally human things is the only way we can realistically understand how to deal with the world and each other.
Perhaps more than ever before, though, there’s this bizarre belief in our world that when we are wrong once, we are wrong always and there’s no coming back from that. There’s a sick, twisted idea that we should see other people in this way, holding them as “unforgiveable” for things that they might have begged for forgiveness for. There’s a sick, twisted idea that we can’t forgive ourselves for our mistakes.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from the writings, speeches, and handful of conversations I even got to have with my hero John Perkins is that the biggest fight we can partake in this world is not to be correct all the time. It’s to be loving. We live and learn, and then we have to pass those lessons on to others.
A huge part of that is by withholding from anger even in the face of injustice around us, because we have to notice within ourselves the areas in which we have been unjust. All reconciliation begins with recognition of brokenness, and this entire world is broken. Anger may want a voice, but it also needs a place to land once it’s run out of steam and worn its voice out.
So it’s not about being correct in an incorrect world, it’s about being love in an unloving world. Love is our final fight.