Comic Strip Reality

“Only what I want to believe is real,” says Winslow in today’s Prickly City comic (Scott Stantis, Prickly City in Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, July 21, 2020, Section 4, pg. 6).

Winslow is responding to Carmen’s statement that men were walking on the moon 51 years ago. Actually, that was yesterday’s date, not today’s, but close enough. Winslow, in his smug way, is refuting her claim with his own claim of “fake news.”

I read cartoons rather innocently and naively, for the humor. I do enjoy the fact that several cartoon artists have written the coronavirus pandemic into their characters’ lives, along with the occasional political jab. According to some of the members of the GoComics website, Stantis usually makes conservatives happier than he does liberals. I don’t really mind one way or the other. I have been struck with the idea that Carmen is grieving over the state of our country and is trying to decide what to do in November. I’m afraid she may not vote at all!

But a truth is a truth, and today’s truth from Winslow is both simplistic and profound. It is simplistic because it relies on the absolute sovereignty of the individual—and the absolute self-centeredness of said human being. How absurdly conceited. And how wrong-headed. At the same time, it is profound because no one can refute what comes out of a person’s mouth. What one says, if said sincerely, is truth to that person. It is, indeed, what the individual believes.

What is devastating about Winslow’s statement, a statement that echoes the words—and beliefs—of many people in our world, is the inclusion of the word “want.” That’s where the self-centeredness, the conceit, and the wrong-headedness resides: in the person’s “want,” in desire, in, perhaps, lust. For people to create their own realities seeds chaos and sows unrest. Coalitions between these people are created when they “want” to believe the same rhetoric for a while. But those coalitions are not stable; they are as fluid as people’s wants are.

What first caught my eye in Stantis’s cartoon this morning was the mention of the moon walk, an event which I remember well. I was in Guyana, South America for the summer, living with a group of college students in a missionary’s home in Georgetown. The evening after the moon walk occurred on July 20, the whole town’s population seemed to be in the downtown square looking up at a bright, clear moon. We Americans were so proud that our astronauts had accomplished something that had never happened before.

But some of our Guyanese friends were more than incredulous: they did not believe the event. They thought the American government had created the images we had seen on the television screen. Not us Americans: we knew our scientists, we knew our technology, we knew our dedication, we knew our determination. We had no doubt that our astronauts had walked on the moon. It wasn’t what we “wanted” to believe was true. We trusted what we knew to be true and real, based on our past experiences and knowledge of our space program.

“Want” is such a weak word. I don’t intend to build my reality on weakness. My reality is based on all kinds of knowledge and experience and wisdom gained from others’ knowledge and experience. My religious tradition is that of John Wesley, and my church teaches the importance of the “Wesleyan quadrilateral.” What makes our faith strong is the combination of four elements: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Our religious reality is not what we “want” to believe; it is a strong amalgam of inside and outside forces, of past and present ideas, of words and actions.

This strong kind of belief, which is not based on desire, but on a solid foundation of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience reminds me of the life of the late congressman John Lewis. Throughout his life his belief system was strong and consistent. He was for the equality of all at any cost to himself, but he would deal with everyone, even those who called themselves his enemies, with kindness and non-violence. He never was satisfied to “want” a particular reality; he worked daily to bring about that reality. He died with his bill to restore the complete Voting Rights Act on the Senate Majority Leader’s desk and several other bills that he was sponsoring or co-sponsoring in committee, including one that was presented just one day before he died.

The strength of his belief kept him steady through all his years. His reality included a skull fracture he received when police beat him as he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965. It included many arrests and nights in jail when he protested the unfairness of the “Jim Crow” laws that ruled in the South. It included being castigated by racists who wanted to silence him. But the reality was not based on a weak “want” but on a strong belief, buoyed by scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

May we all build the same kind of reality.

Works Cited

Stantis, Scott. Prickly City. Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, July 21, 2020, Section 4, page 6.

Stantis, Scott. Prickly City. GOComics. Tuesday, July 21, 2020. https://www.gocomics.com/pricklycity