While I was on a recent radio show, a student called in from
a campus “Rally Against 1070,” that challenged Arizona’s
draconian immigration law. The rally was a great idea, part of the public
outcry that’s needed. But I wish they’d called it something like “Rally Against
the Show Us Your Papers Law.” Headlining it with a bill number gave people nothing
to respond to emotionally.
Over nearly the 40 years that I’ve spoken out on various
causes and written about citizen movements, I’ve come to believe that people
work for justice when their hearts are stirred by specific lives and situations
that develop our capacity to feel empathy, to imagine ourselves as someone
else. New information—the percentage of people out of work or children in
poverty, the numbers of workplace injuries—can help us comprehend the magnitude
of our shared problems and develop appropriate responses. But information alone
can’t provide the organic connection that binds one person to another, or that
stirs our hearts to act.
Powerful stories can break us beyond our isolated worlds.
“They link teller to listeners,” writes Scott Russell Sanders, "and
listeners to one another.” They let us glimpse the lives of those older or
younger, richer or poorer, of different races, from places we’ll never even
see. Showing us the links between choices and consequences, they train our
sight, “give us images for what is truly worth seeking, worth having, worth
doing.”
We are more likely to challenge homelessness if we hear the
testimonies of individual people living on the street. People are more likely
to support an organizing campaign if they hear the stories of what the
workers go through day by day.
Concrete stories can help us engage the world’s troubles
without becoming so overwhelmed that we despair of ever being able to change
things. As psychologist Joanna Macy reminds us, “Information by
itselfcan increase resistance [to engagement], deepening the
sense of apathy and powerlessness.” Stories about particular individuals and
specific situations usually have the opposite effect. By giving seemingly
overwhelming problems a human face, they allow us to act from a sense of
loyalty to specific people, communities, or places. Responsibility in this
view becomes not an abstract principle but a way of being and connecting.
Stories motivate through a sense of connection, whether we
encounter them first hand or retold by others.
I saw this when Oregon
state employees, who were predominantly female and universally underpaid, began
fighting for a living wage. Their unions started the campaign by hiring experts
to draw up more equitable pay schedules. The resulting task force surveyed
every category of job, then presented an elaborate report in the most neutral
technical terms. At the request of top-level managers, they added more data.
Eventually the study became so unwieldy and abstract that ordinary workers felt
it had nothing to do with their lives, or their gut sense that their labor was
undervalued. “Most of those affected couldn’t even talk about the proposals,”
recalled the economist who chaired the task force, “because they didn’t know the
language, all the personnel-oriented, management-oriented terms. It left them
completely out of the discussion.”.
Then the unions shifted strategy, arranging for
public-sector employees to speak for themselves to the media, community groups,
and their elected officials. They posed simple but very telling questions: Why
did women who took care of children at university daycare centers earn less
than workers monitoring animals at local private research labs? Why did
public-sector secretaries earn less than mail carriers? Testifying before the
state legislature, they explained that their jobs mattered greatly to them, as
well as to the community. Then they asked the senators how much they thought
they earned. Holding up pay stubs as proof, they shamed the legislators with
the reality of their economic plight: Some made so little for full-time work,
they needed food stamps to get by. The union won pay raises and other
concessions that made working conditions more equitable. It triumphed by
letting their members tell their own stories, in their own words, and by so
doing going to the heart of their cause.
