Our Better Selves Can Prevail
On Friday, 10/28, 2022, StoryCorp founder David Isay took to the City Club of Cleveland stage for a truly remarkable hour. If you aren’t familiar, StoryCorp is a non-profit whose mission is “to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” Launched in 2003 with an interview booth placed in Grand Central Terminal, StoryCorp has captured more than half a mission people’s stories. Some of them wonderful, some sad, some remarkable, some hilarious….but all important.
David started off his talk by sharing the story of 9-year-old Aidan Sykes interviewing his dad who talked to him about Black fatherhood and his hopes for his son’s future. (Link: Sykes Interview.)
David spoke about seeing these stories as a hallowed ground where people are sharing out of generosity and love. The next story he shared was from Boris Yaro who in 1968 had just shaken hands with Bobby Kennedy seconds before he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Link: Boris Yaro
Over the past 20 years, StoryCorp has learned so much about how important it is that we have a chance to share our stories and learn to understand one another by truly knowing more about who we are as people. This led Mr. Isay to launch another initiative, potentially even more important than his first.
In his own words, Davis is “in agony seeing what is happening in this country.” Never before has the country been more divided, and we can seem to have lost the ability to disagree with people we still see as human. The statistics he shared from their research on how polarized the country is right now is devastating. It is also illuminating in that it is mathematically providing to us that our Democracy is not guaranteed. We need to work at it. David’s attempt to help work on it is a new initiative called “One Small Step.” This initiative has been carefully organized by a group of specialists to bring together people who have very different beliefs for a conversation. A conversation not to try and convince one another that the other is wrong; but a conversation to just learn more about one another…because in David’s words ‘it’s hard to hate up close.”
David shared the story from “One Small Step” of a relationship forged on the similarities between a MAGA Hat and a Hijab. The interview is also worth a quick listen: Link: Click HERE. On the website, you can register to be paired with someone. Perhaps the most inspiring point of the talk was when he mentioned that the waiting list for being paired is quite long, which corroborates their research that “over 80% of the country is tired of the hate.”
While it’s impossible for me to capture here the magic that was that hour with David Isay, I hope people consider spending some time on the StoryCorp webpage to be influenced by the power of a story. I’d like to end by sharing a couple of David’s parting thoughts….
“It is possible to hate someone whose story you have heard. “
“We have forgotten that we belong to one another.”
“We have to believe that our better selves can prevail.”
Best,
Mike Christoff