Opening Spaces
The problem is:
While a great many people in a great many places do heroic things every day, collectively we don’t think that we have the power to change our environment and, worse, we don’t feel that we ought to or need to stand up for justice and ‘right.’ I’m not even sure that some of us know what justice and ‘right’ and ethical is anymore. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be ethical and ‘good.’ But the path--which is never absolute and is always filled with difficult choices--has been obscured by information overload and commercialization and rapid change.
A few months ago, a young man on a web site was talking about being fired from his job with a large company. He had worked in some kind of computer support and had escalated what he, at least, perceived as a large customer problem to get it resolved. He cited as his inspiration the company’s Core Values and Beliefs, 14 Deadly Sins and Call Center Tenets. He kept trying to solve the problem until he found a solution. He was fired. He posted about this on a web site and an astonishing number of responders told him that he was foolish and naïve to even think that the things his employer told him were important were, in fact, important. Many of them said things like, ‘make your boss look good,’ ‘don’t worry about this stuff if you want to keep your job,’ ‘what were you thinking?’ Along similar lines, I recently saw a survey that said that 60% of college freshmen cite as their biggest goal when they graduate a comfortable life with sufficient material goods.
And yet, collectively, we admire heroic action in all its forms. We’re most comfortable with it in film and fiction and sports, but we still respond to rescue workers and people who struggle against adversity and spontaneous acts of bravery with celebration and support. I once rented a series of training and development video tapes for my students. Some of them were good, some of them were silly, but the one that had the greatest impact was one called, ‘Creating the Heroic environment.’ People want to be heroic, they dream about it and read about it and write about it. A lot of people recreate themselves everyday trying to at least make themselves the heroes of their own stories. But, really, very few of us anymore know how to be involved in the ongoing actions of the world, how to make any kind of important difference that doesn’t involve making more money or making sure our child gets more advantages than that other kid or following the rules in a way that works for us and lets us keep our jobs. We don’t even know sometimes that we get a say. And the portrayal of heroes in film and fiction and sports generally tells us that heroes are people who are many things, but mostly they are ‘not-us.’
I want us to glory in the idea of standing up again. I want us all to understand that we don’t have to be afraid to want something more, that we don’t have to defend corporations, that we don’t have to be cynical. I want to promote the idea of imperfect people doing good things. And I want to show people that we can build this off what we have right now. ‘Doing good’ is not dependent on strict codes or condemning others or saving only the righteous. We have the pieces right here at our disposal--in our myths and our history and ourselves.
I want to help create the space where these things can be imagined, where the idea that we have some measure of control over our destiny, that we can stand up for things, that, indeed, some things are ‘wrong,’ can take root and grow. And it’s not about how easy and wonderful and glorious it would be if we had more heroes in our life. It’s about how complicated and hard and difficult, but also how possible. And we lose something and we gain something, but we’re all important and we all contribute and we all get to ask questions and we all count.