Stuff I wrote before I had a blog: Thing One
I'm cleaning and I've found some old notebooks....
One thing I think a lot about lately is our need for story. We get caught up in the foibles of our leaders, but we seem so concerned with people seeing us and watching us and judging us that we seem to have forgotten much of the story of who we are, the principles this country was founded on, and who we want to be. Some of the greatest good in this country has been done by people who want to be better than they are and by people who believe it's possible to make things better.
I hear this stuff all the time--'well, that's the way it is' or 'we'll have to learn to do business in this new global economy,' or 'well, he's making all that money, so he must be good and it must be okay for him to have made that money in whatever way he did.' And it seems clear ot me that we've forgotten that we are it. We are the people. It's our culture, our country, our way of life.
We need stories. We need stories not just of wish-fulfillment and not just of small things, not just of despair and not just of goodness triumphing because it's good. We need complex stories of society and flawed people and changing things. We need ways to shift paradigms. And ways to reinvent democracy--or at least to recognize what it is and what it means again. We need both fiction and 'real' stories. And we need stories in the sense that Neil Postman spoke of them--stories that help us to communicate to one another and to understand what we want and what we have and what we hold.