Talking about Heaven
Storytelling to bridge divides
The world, we know, is going to hell. My father tells me so; my husband tells me so; Fox News tells me so — and so do The Washington Post and Facebook and Twitter and The New York Times and the National Review. Reportedly, it is the end of days … again.
Waiting for eighth grade to start in the dog days of summer in 1990, I drew in frilly letters in the corner of the page of my diary a heart with the initials of my first love, PJE, next to it. I also scrawled a little drawing of a missile and some explosion doodles. The entry, in pink ink in my pink diary, reads: “The U.S. is dropping bombs on Iraq. People live there I want to help them cause they’re scared.”
Ultimately, this deep urge to help others has lead me to, Spaceship Media, where I am project director and currently managing The Many, a closed Facebook group for women of all political affiliations — Republican, Democrat, and everything in between. In The Many, women from around the country engage in civil conversations about current events, social media, women’s health and, yes, politics — lots of politics. In these deep and difficult discussions, there are very often moments when I am trying to help someone see someone else’s point of view. Not to change anyone’s mind, mind you, that’s not what we are after at Spaceship; what we want is to support people in seeing one another as humans, to recognize the wealth of commonalities we share, to be able to discuss difficult issues respectfully, and for that to be a salve that begins to heal our many, many national fractures.
On a recent Saturday, a left-leaning participant in the group posted a story from the Washington Post about a young white woman named Heaven who works in a chicken plant in rural Pennsylvania. Heaven feels isolated because most of the other workers are Spanish-speaking. She refuses to interact with her coworkers, and the story documents how the language barrier seems insurmountable to her. When one of the immigrant woman falls near her, Heaven is frozen by her feelings of inadequacy and doesn’t move to help her.
Several members of The Many expressed disdain for Heaven, writing comments like “she doesn’t feel like she has to learn” and “she could just learn a few phrases in Spanish if she really wanted.” On that Saturday morning, I read along, disheartened that our group of women — usually so empathetic and curious — was having a hard time putting themselves in another woman’s shoes.
I decided to engage and try to introduce the empathy for Heaven that the participants were having a hard time embodying. “I agree that the article talks a lot about how Heaven has had opportunities to learn but rejected them,” I wrote. “However, I don’t think it is as cut and dry as her assuming that it’s up to the Spanish speakers to learn English. I think she’s lonely and scared. Have any of you ever been in a situation where everyone is so different that you opt out?”
One member, Ashley Edwards, said she did have an experience of “unimaginable loneliness” while at Auburn University. “But,” she continued, “I learned to stretch myself, to make myself visible even when no one extended a hand.” Edwards said she didn’t think Heaven deserved our empathy, saying that she thinks it is a “dangerous choice to let that loneliness fester into anger or resentment.”
Edwards and I continued our conversation where I shared — like we encourage all of the women in The Many to share — a story to help illustrate my position.
“I speak to my daughter in Spanish all the time. I want her to speak Spanish,” I wrote. Being that I am Mexican-American and raised in a Spanish-speaking home, I want to pass that skill and cultural knowledge on to her. “Sometimes we get glares. I always make a point, when that happens, to speak a sentence to her in clear English. I worry in those moments that we will experience some micro-aggression or something worse.”
This conversation kept on with Edwards and I going back and forth and back again. Until finally — after 42 interactions — Edwards thanked me for “softening her views.” I didn’t change her mind; I did help her see Heaven’s point of view.
You might be wondering why I’ve chosen to highlight this exchange. Sure, after Edwards and I made our points and talked it through, she thanked me and her perspective had shifted slightly. But that’s not why I’m telling this story. As the hours and days went on, our conversation, kept getting more and more “likes.” There we were, having a one-on-one discussion in the public of the group; no one else was commenting, but they were reading.
I spent the bulk of my career sitting in the center of a newsroom at a newspaper in its heyday. I listened to reporters on the phone doing what they do: teasing out stories, often deeply personal ones. The best of them were story pullers and their most effective method to get sources to share their story was by telling a story of their own. I can’t tell you how many times I heard a reporter share a bit of a personal story, then fall quiet, start typing and hang up. They had what they wanted. They had their quote. They had completed their engagement with one member of the community and shifted gears to present the engagement to a larger swath of that community.
These days, I spend a lot of time wondering why engagement journalism is often discussed with a scoff among my peers (the newspapering ones). I wonder about the scoffing, because, in many ways, we are really doing the same thing. In The Many, as in the example above, I tell my story to help Edwards tell her own, just as a reporter would. And because the exchange is public, other members of the community are reading, a broader audience, is privy to that story exchange, much like if I were taking pieces of that exchange and writing a story. In having these sort of conversations with one person, we are impacting the world view of many.
Reporters use stories as a means to connect with their communities. They take one person’s or a handful of people’s stories and weave them, in their own voice, for the community at large. They shape others’ through their lens, with their biases and present it under their byline. In The Many, that distance is removed; the interview part of the engagement is public, All the voices in my story are first person. I am transparent about how my personal experiences color my views, as is the member of the public; the interviewee is alive and voiced and real.
Journalists are storytellers and stories are what help people find their own truth and — more importantly — help people see the truth of others. Journalists are also teachers of humanity; we should be constantly asking ourselves, “How am I making my readers’ community better? How does my perspective help my community?”
Let’s help our communities by using our storytelling skills to usher and nourish kindness and compassion, to help people engage across the political fault lines that currently fracture our democracy. Let’s stop being above our own truths and acknowledge that the world isn’t going to hell, that’s just click bait.
Spaceship Media’s The Many is a closed, moderated Facebook group for women across the country and of all political stripes from hard left, hard right and everything in between. The group will run at least until midterm elections in November and is a place to talk civilly and respectfully about a range of political and social issues. Visit our website to learn more about the project and join the conversation by filling out this form.
