More Spill Their Coffee Moments, Please

I was on a mountainside in Portugal learning about permaculture when the local eco journalist, a German transplant, demanded to know if I had read Tightrope. The implication hanging in the air being if I haven’t I don’t know the inequality in the US, my country of origin.

Maybe I had been talking about development economics which is what I studying in graduate school in India. Because I too left my country of origin it did not mean I was unaware of the inequalities there. I grew up in Wisconsin and returned one summer with a friend from the University of Iowa. That summer we drove through a part of Milwaukee I had never been to before. There were iron bars on the window of what looked like a walk up convenient store.

Since that summer I hadn’t seen that type of security, even as I traveled through India, Nepal, Thailand, parts of Mexico. The next time I saw this form of protection from the woes of poverty and inequality I was doing research in LA and I was biking to a permaculture garden in Compton. On my return to Marina Del Ray I stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom. In between the dining room and the cashiers was a layer of glass. Bullet proof, I assume. This was 2015, well before employees needed protection from corona.

The eco journalist posed his challenge at the beginning of corona and in the middle of president Trump, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, the immigration ban. I wasn’t sure I had the heart for reading another slice of life of American inequalities.

But in the end I placed a hold on Tightrope, a book by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sandra Wodunn, and waited for the electronic notification from my library. I read the book and realized, this is another book that hit me like the first time I read Michael Pollan’s, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It was a story behind the story book that humanized a school bus full of Nicholas’ former classmates and helped me see the policy ills that as a teenager I felt were misplaced but that over time I came to accept as something I couldn’t do anything about.

Instead of feeling hopeless, however, I felt inspired as Kristof and WuDunn shared the amazing work that innovative people have been doing in the US to solve the problems caused by this structural inequality.

A year later I listened to a podcast interview Kristof did with Street Roots Podcast, which was created by Street Roots, an organization focused on social justice who create an award winning newspaper by and about people who are experiencing homelessness and poverty.

On this podcast the interviewer, host DeVon Pouncey asked Kristof, how his life experiences, those related to reporting in war zones, impact what he covers for the New York Times?

“I think the power of journalism is not so much changing people’s minds about issues that they’ve thought about, but rather it’s sometimes making them think about issues that they’d rather not. And I tend to think that we as a society are worse at addressing issues that are hard to talk about…

And one thing that I can do as a journalist is write articles, kind of force readers to pay attention to these difficult, awkward issues and make them uncomfortable, make my readers spill their coffee in the morning. And hopefully, in some cases that is going to be a step towards better policy. So that’s what I try, I try to make my readers spill their coffee.”

Make people spill their coffee!

This is what storytelling means to me, storytelling for social change is about creating a feeling and a shift in understanding.

In my own film work, my intention is to make people fall in love with the people and environments I film. I believe that the more we are exposed to people and ideas in different forms, the more we come to accept, appreciate and even love them. So my intention is to bring a diverse set of people into my work including age, color, body types. And I give space in my podcasts and in my video work for people to share their story behind their story.

We can write a story with a loosely defined intention. But we create a far greater emotional resonance and impact when we think through our intentions, get clear about what we believe, who we want to reach, what we want to share and the emotional impact we wish to inspire.

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