Who Questions More? Who Does Not?

This has truly been a week where the news analysts and reporters have become the news. It began with virtually simultaneous attacks on Julian Assange and RT, then Hillary Clinton went on a rant lumping both Wikileaks and RT with both the ‘Russian state’ and Donald Trump, a man whose personality is in many ways more American than a burger being eaten by a cheerleader in a Cadillac.

The week has closed with EU President Donald Tusk rambling on about Russia trying to destabilise Europe and a British Prime Minister who actually is destabilising Europe buying into the ‘Putin did it’ rhetoric. From magazine covers to fake internet news stories, it’s all over the place and as I wrote earlier, it’s not all bad. The pathetic nature of the mainstream media meltdown is leading many people to question more to borrow RT’s apposite motto. But who are these people questioning more?

We are a diverse group. We are the cab drivers, we are the professors, we are the gamblers, the chess players, the waiters and chefs. We are the artists and the art buyers, we are the sportsmen and the elderly, we are the young and confused, we are the young and informed.

We are the veterans and the pacifists, we are Russians, we are Americans, we are Syrians, we are Japanese. We are Atheists, we are Muslims, we are Jews, we are Hindus and Christians. We are butchers and vegans, we are the tall and the short, the shy and the gregarious.

We however, are not quite everyone. I have noticed a broad pattern amongst those who ‘question more’. I notice a likeminded desire to try and understand life’s expanse, its complications but also its simple truths. Justice after all is a simple concept but its application can often be highly difficult and morally burdensome. But I’ve found that those who ‘question more’ are willing to take up the mantle of this challenge. I have found people more concerned for the sake of humanity than for the characters of a human.

I have found people for whom education begins after school; it doesn’t end upon receipt of a degree or diploma. I have found people who do not believe creativity ends when the music’s over or when the gallery’s lights go out. I have found people who do not believe that reality can be put into simple boxes of ‘us versus them’. I have found an insatiable spirit and a disdain for the mundane and the hypocritical. We are over all the people who understand the haunting words of Roger Waters, “Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend, we were all equal in the end”.

But what about those who question less or question not at all? There exists a temptation to label them all as stupid and believe me some of them are deeply stupid indeed. But many are highly educated in a formal sense. Many see towing a corporate media line as being implicit in their own success and equanimity, when such a concept is a totally false dichotomy.

Some are has-beens, so past their prime that they feel they are too old to question more, when this is of course a self-inflicted nonsense. Some actively make money by questioning less. You know the type, journalists, writers and so-called thinkers who believe the truth should be covered in a metaphysical burqa, rather than be revealed in all its beautiful and ugly nakedness.

Many are naive, they simply cannot believe an establishment they grew up thinking was righteous and magnanimous could be capable of being devious and ignominious. Many others feel intellectually and even emotionally threatened should they allow themselves to question more let alone say so publicly.

Whilst I always invite people to question more, this particular piece is dedicated to those who are already doing so. Whether it be Julian Assange or the man in the bookshop, the woman in the coffee house, this is dedicated to you. Keep on questioning more and the world just may slowly become a place which is a reflection of its highest potential, not its lowest instincts. It is dedicated to those whom to quote Mr. Waters again, refuse to become ‘comfortably numb’.