(paraphrased from Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture)
A blind sage is challenged by a skeptic. The skeptic holds a small still bird in his hands and asks the blind sage, if she is so wise, to tell him if the bird is alive or dead.
"I don’t know," she says, "but I do know this: the bird is in your hands."
I heard a version of this today, and soon afterward read Frank Rich’s column in the Sunday New York Times suggesting that the latest populist rage represents President Obama’s Katrina moment.
Rich’s column reads like a writer who thinks journalism’s work ends at telling readers what questions he has.
Are we so helpless and still we do nothing but wait for Obama to do something? Why do we demand that Obama know the unknowable? Why do we believe it is Obama’s job to heed our complaints, to fix our future by answering for everyone’s past?
Obama may as well answer with what he has been telling us since he started on his path: it is in our hands. Like the bird, our fate is in our own hands. All of us: journalists and investors, business owners and workers, citizens and legislators. If it is dead, we killed it. If it has hope, it is our hope.
The sage’s answer redirects a petty challenge into a call to take responsibility. What are we waiting for? I think we can.