When the Express, (the crappy Washington Post lite run by interns free paper for Metro riders), ran a front-page photo last week of a woman in a burqa enduring the freezing weather in Afghanistan, I read the article.
I probably would have just flipped by it two weeks ago, it wouldn’t have seemed relevant; but since then I have read Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the two best-sellers by Khaled Hosseini, each set vividly against the backdrop of the struggles of living in volatile Kabul, now I am paying attention. Now, I have developed an appreciation for life of the Afghani people.
I find this surprising, because this isn’t like when Christopher Moore’s Fluke got me thinking for the first time about saving the whales or a year in the life of Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable Miracle opened my eyes to the notion of focusing on eating locally. No, Afghanistan and the plight of it’s people have been headline news on and off for seven years now.
But it wasn’t the headlines that got my attention, it was the stories.
Reading these two fictional stories of the struggles of Hosseini’s protagonists living through the political turmoil and warfare, and the resulting classist, racist and sexist societies that each new overthrowing regime instituted struck a chord in a way that three minute newscasts never did.
Author Daniel Pink, in his book about the working of the brain, A Whole New Mind, stresses that Story is an under-utilized but extremely powerful means of conveying message. It leads me to wonder, why don’t more causes get their message across through Story?
Great post. One of my classes in college, in my Leadership Studies major, was about the history of social movements. The one quote that has stuck with me for lo these 12 years or so is the one the professor shared describing the most powerful means to build support for social causes: “People impart their truth through stories.” And it’s so true. Think about even something as wonky as the State of the Union address. Presidents always use the examples of “real people” up in the gallery to tell their story in order to make some specific point about a policy agenda. That’s also why I always try to get people more interested in my work that history is just stories, of real people and things that happened.