Yeah, it's been a while. But I decided to come back to the ole blog, and try my hand at more organized, regular content. Something like twice a week, and no more than a few paragraphs at a time. So here goes:
I am a writer, and I have a problem with narrative.
Not in stories, but in real life. Real life is not a narrative. Not everything fits together, at least not in any way we can see.
I recently read Donald Miller's excellent book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, where he advocates trying to live a better story. I am totally in favor of this. By all means, we should go out and try to live lives that will make for compelling stories. This is a really good way to make inspired, courageous decisions, instead of letting life drag you along listlessly through repetitive, passive drudgery.
However, the problem comes in when this impulse to inject life with themes and drama overrides actually paying attention to the complexities in life. The problem comes in when you strip out any ambiguity and reduce every story to a battle of pure good against utter evil. The problem comes in when you make other people the villains in your story.
Almost no one in real life is totally evil - and we no that no mortal human is perfectly good. So while selfishness may be involved in the motives of people we don't agree with, it is unfair to ignore any validity in their argument out of hand because of perceived selfishness - or any vice for that matter. "Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam."
Fox News - and to be fair, The Daily Show and many other news outlets - draw many people to their side by painting everything with broad strokes, by contorting complex reality until it fits into a prescribed narrative that explains the world. So rather than talk about the health care bill and whether it will do what it aims to do effectively, we get sidetracked with talk about "death panels" (because the Democrats don't value human life, do they?). Rather than show the clip in context, we get Alan Grayson misusing footage to paint his opponent as "Taliban Dan" (because all religious people are holier-than-thou misogynists, right?).
Manichean thinking is a disease, but it is one people easily get swallowed up in because "us versus them" makes for a compelling story. We don't need to actually stop and listen to our opponents, because they are the evil villains out to destroy us and everything we care about, right? And we all know our side is the good guys, right?
Stephen King once wrote about how coming up with a story is like excavating a dinosaur. You have to start one bone at a time, and carefully brush and exhume the skeleton. If you go in there with a jackhammer, if you try to force it, you'll destroy the story. Well I'd say that the political extremists dominating discussion today do one better. They dig up a pinky bone, and since they know they were looking for a Tyrannosaurus, then that's what it belongs to. No one even bothers to see what else might be down there, a pterodactyl or a stegosaurus or even a woolly mammoth. Just fit what we found into what everybody knows is down there, and call it a day. Anything more would just be redundant - or more likely, it might clutter up and confuse our conveniently pre-packaged story.
So let's dig a little deeper. On November 2nd, whatever you do, don't vote for a party ticket. Even if you end up voting for each individual Democrat or Republican, at least do some research. See what they stand for. See how they've voted in the past. See if their actual life matches the narrative they've constructed to sell themselves to the public.
And, scariest of all, don't forget that sooner or later we need to check up on how well the narrative we tell about ourselves matches reality.
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