THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"WHO GETS TO TELL THE STORIES?"
Sermon Preached by Rev. Mike Young
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
January 17, 1999When I was about four years old I lived in Calexico, California, down on the Mexican border about halfway between San Diego and Yuma. The cattle used to be driven through town on their way to the stockyards. The route through town went half a block from my house. My sister and I were out in front one day, and saw the cattle going by. Deanna and I and our dog Daisy went walking down to the corner and stood there as I don't know how many hundreds of steers came roaring past. One of those steers veered out of the mass of cow flesh and was headed right for us. Daisy, a little cocker spaniel pooch, went running right at that big steer, barking and growling and raising an awful ruckus. She turned that steer back into the herd and saved our lives.
I was raised with that story. Only Deanna and Daisy and I were there. I was four years old. I remember that incident as clearly as I remember any other incident in my life. But whose story was it? Who told that story? Surely, it wasn't Deanna or I at three and four years old. How did it get to be a physical memory of mine that I remember as if I, indeed, were standing there, smelling the dust and stink of the cows?
The stories that we tell shape who we are and how we are; shape the world that we live in. In our dedication of Sophia Rene Kenani Morgan this morning, I told the grandparents, "It's your job to tell the stories." That's a no small assignment. For, as we tell the stories that are our heritage, we create who we are and who we will become. And it's scary, for the stories that we tell as a part of the culture are just like that story of me and the cows. Just as in that story, because they become the things that we think are our own experience, our own memories, in that very real way, they become a part of the fabric of who we are.
As I acknowledge that fact, I look at who is telling the stories to my children. My son Jot and I have a story telling pattern that we have had since even before he could talk. The pattern is that at bedtime when I'm home I go in and sit on his bed and say, "Well, what's our story going to be tonight?" He gives me the characters and the setting. Now, sometimes it's Auntie Pele meets Gargantua, but the characters and setting that he gives me often subtly allude to pieces that are going on in his life. Then I have to make up a story that fits the parameters he's given me. I realize quite consciously that in telling these stories I am telling Jot who he is. I am telling him who we are and what being a human being in this world, in this community, is like.
But I am keenly aware that there is also that television set that is telling stories, and I'd darn well better be at least as good a storyteller. They're tough competition. That television set is what our society has come to use as the vehicle for telling us our stories back to us, adults and children. When we complain about the number of hours our children are before the television set, bear in mind that the whole massive media system out there, newspapers and television and radio--the overwhelming majority of which is owned by five corporations--tell you the stories of who you are and how you will be. They have that powerful subtle ability that the stories someone told in my family had to impart to me the smell of cows.
I don't know what stories we will tell ten years from now about this past year's experience of this nation. I can hardly wait. It will depend on so many things. It will depend on who wins because the winner gets to tell the stories, with rare exceptions. It will depend on our reaction to those stories because one of the things that has happened in our society is that the stories are told to us that will get us to buy soap, throwing another twist in who gets to tell the stories. For we aren't told the stories, very often, that will make us not buy what's being offered by those five corporations that own the storytellers.
The more I think about the degree to which the story is a part of the defining of our lives and what we are doing in this culture with the communication media, the more scared I become about my own involvement with them, to say nothing of the society's involvement with them.
One of the things that I did a great deal of in Tampa was to appear in the print and electronic media. I had become one of the people that the reporters would call up and say, "Can we interview you?" whenever a controversial issue was in the news. They would interview a right-wing crazy on the subject and then they would come and interview me. That was their notion of balanced news reporting. I was never really comfortable about being the token left-wing crazy, but I discovered that I am an environmentalist. I know that I am an environmentalist because I have seen my mug on the TV screen with the words written underneath it, "Reverend Mike Young, Environmentalist." This is what qualifies you. And the fact that this is what qualifies you is terrifying!
As a part of that experience, I learned that I could shape what ended up on television. The skill in shaping that is a rather interesting one. The speaker must realize that he or she is not speaking to the TV audience out there. The speaker is not speaking to the TV reporter standing there with the microphone. The speaker is not speaking to the TV camera person aiming that device at your face. The speaker is speaking to an anonymous video tape editor back at the TV station. When the videotape cassette comes in out of the field, that editor is going to go through it fast and will use the images that grab the editor's imagination. It's going to be that image, without the sound even on, that's going to determine what gets on TV.
They say you get three sound bites. It is possible, if you practice, to mumble and be incoherent except for the three sentences that you want to be on TV. The system is manipulable. It takes a good deal of consciousness and intentionality to do it, but it is manipulable.
Let me give you an example of the manipulation of it. One of the really boring issues is household toxic waste. I mean, it's really terribly hard to get all that excited about what happens to that little can of rose dust that you use to put on your roses. You probably have never even read the side of the container that says that "this container may only be disposed of in an approved toxic waste dump." Says it on the box. Says it on a whole lot of things in your kitchen closet. We were trying to get a bill passed in Florida that would provide places in the community where people could take these things instead of surreptitiously throwing them in their trash. The trash men were supposed to be throwing them back at you.
It's especially critical in Florida, even more so than here, when the stuff gets tossed in the regular dump. Our dumps in Florida leak and the aquifer is literally only a few feet under your feet. When I first arrived there I got a lot of attention by saying, "Watch where you spit. You're going to be drinking it in about two weeks." So we were doing a press hit, as we call it, for the bill that was going through the county commission. I found a vacant lot, not too far from my house in Tampa, right next to the river. This vacant lot suffered from constant dumping by people who were too lazy to take the stuff to the dump. There were always piles of trash. The poor guy that owns this thing gets ticketed by the city regularly to clean up his lot because everybody around dumps crap on his lot. Just to be sure that there would be a pile down there for the TV cameras I went down and checked and saw to it that there were a few containers of the right sort. I didn't have to salt the piles; but I was prepared to do so, if necessary. The TV cameramen arrived on cue because they'd gotten used to the fact that when we ran press conferences we gave them good visuals. They were there in force. In fact, one of them had to be guided in by the helicopter. He couldn't find it and they sent the TV station's helicopter out to guide the truck in. When I saw the helicopter I knew that story was going to make the news. Spend that kind of money, you use the videotape.
The cameramen went crazy. They focused in tightly on that phrase on the can that says "Must be disposed of in an approved toxic waste dump." They panned from the pile, downhill, right to the river where the city of Tampa gets its drinking water. It didn't need a sound bite. That story told the city of Tampa something that it really didn't want to know and needed to know. That particular piece of videotape has been credited by a couple of our enemies for passing the bill.
The stories we, as a society, tell ourselves through the print and electronic media that so permeates our lives shape what is possible, what we can imagine, what seems persuasive to us; shapes what is familiar to us as well as what is not familiar to us, tells us what to be afraid of and whom to trust. All controlled by those five corporations. (I'll monotonously keep reminding you of that.)
Who gets to tell the stories? It is terribly important that we tell our stories, to one another, to our children most especially. We have, as I have said, so many skillful competitors. If you want your children -- and by your children I don't mean only your biologicals, I mean the children that are going to come after you in this society -- it is terribly important that we take responsibility for the stories that we tell, the stories that are told.
When they do studies to find out what makes kids get better grades in school, there are a number of factors that have been sorted out. The most significant piece is school attendance. If the kid comes to school, he gets better grades. As Woody Allen says, "90% of life is just showing up." The second most important thing is whether the parent ever comes around the school. The third thing is even scarier and not particularly related to my story this morning but it is important that I also say it. The third thing is the number of layers between the policy-maker and the teacher. If the people responsible for policy are a layer or two separated from the teacher you get excellence in education. If those layers are more than a couple thick, the quality of education that happens in the kid's head drops off in direct proportion to the number of increased layers.
So much for our assumption that we can change things by ragging the legislature, unless we rag the legislature to get rid of as many of those layers as possible.
Who gets to tell the stories? Downtown today, as we speak, one of the local organizations of Native Hawaiians is telling the story of the overthrow of the Hawaiian nation. Who gets to tell that story? For it is important who tells that story. It will be told differently by the different people that tell it. There is a degree, in fact, to which the telling of that story is almost independent of the abstract notion of what the true facts are. (I love that phrase, "the true facts," -- as opposed to what, the false facts?)
Thurston-Twigg's version of the story differs from the story told by many of the Hawaiian sovereignty supporters, in significant detail. They accuse each other of lying and distorting. They are telling the stories that are their stories. There is a sense in which both of those stories are true, not historically accurate, but true in the sense that those are the stories that have shaped and been shaped by those two community's experience of living in Hawaii.
I was chewed out royally by a lady with the maiden name of Cooke, of Castle & Cooke's fame, when she heard me refer to those who came to Hawaii "to do good and did well." I don't know who's responsible for that wonderful phrase. I first came across it in Michener's book "Hawaii," but I am quite sure that he was reporting a phrase that is older than Michener's reporting. She was most indignant because she is a descendant of the Cooke family. By her story, at least, of all of those missionary families, the Cooke family has given back to the community more than most. It was important to her to tell that story. It was important for me to hear that story, to hear that someone who is very much aware of the blessedness that their family history has laid upon them, is also acutely aware of the responsibility that places on them. That aspect of the story is important and needs to be told and retold.
Who tells the stories makes a difference. But it's also important that we listen to a lot of stories. On any subject that is at all important to you, it is worthwhile to hear as many of the stories as possible.
In memorial services, I often turn to the assembled multitude at the very end of the memorial service and say to them that "the immortality most tangible to you of this loved one now dead is the memories that each of you carry in your memory. Tell those stories. Share those tales. Keep those stories alive." About all of the issues that are crucially important to our community, our society, it is important that we tell as diverse an assortment of the stories as possible. Not because one story is true and another is false and we have to sort them out. Not because one story is just as good as another; but because all of the stories are important for us to know and to understand as we understand how we are, in fact, shaped by the very stories that pass between our ears.
Be careful the stories that you tell. The stories that you tell are shaping how you see your reality, for you are listening to the stories you tell as well. Who you are is very much influenced by your own stories.
Be careful the stories you tell about others.
The story is told of the lady that said terrible vicious things about the rabbi. Finally, she felt very guilty about it and went to the rabbi and apologized deeply for passing this vicious untrue gossip about him. She said, "What can I do to make up for it?" He said, "Here's what you must do: Take your best feather pillow up onto the hilltop, rip the pillow open and scatter the feathers. Then go pick up every one." Gathering back the gossip is as easy.
Be careful the stories that you tell. Pay attention to the stories we are telling each other. Be aware of them as stories. Hear, as you hear the stories, read the articles in the newspaper, see the things on television, even on public TV, that we are by those devices telling ourselves who we are. Listen for who we are telling ourselves we are. If that's not who you want to be, treat that story with some very great attention and care.
It is not insignificant who gets to tell the stories and what stories they tell. We so easily end up with the scent in our nose of cows not our own.