You Can't Kill the Story

Republished from the CrossWalk America blog. There, you can also read "Musings on McGrath," my promised reflections on last week's post. -h

The quote below is from Bill Moyers, a speech on America's corporate media system called "Life on the Plantation."

The question of whether our political and economic system is truly just or not is off the table for investigation and discussion by most journalists. Alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions rarely get a hearing, and uncomfortable realities are obscured, such as growing inequality, the re-segregation of our public schools, the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation– all examples of what happens when independent sources of knowledge and analysis are so few and far between on the plantation.

So if we need to know what is happening, and big media won’t tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and big media won’t tell us; if we need to know what to do about it, and big media won’t tell us – it’s clear what we have to do: we have to tell the story ourselves.

And this is what the plantation owners fear most of all. Over all those decades here in the South when they used human beings as chattel and quoted scripture to justify it (property rights over human rights was God’s way), they secretly lived in fear that one day instead of saying, “Yes, Massa,” those gaunt, weary sweat-soaked field hands bending low over the cotton under the burning sun would suddenly stand up straight, look around at their stooped and sweltering kin, and announce: “This can’t be the product of intelligent design. The bossman’s been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system.” This is the moment freedom begins – the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself. When the garbage workers struck here in 1968, and the walls of these buildings echoed with the cry “I am a man,” they were writing their own story. Martin Luther King, Jr. came here to help them tell it, only to die on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The bullet killed him, but it couldn’t kill the story. You can’t kill the story once the people start writing it.

- from "Life on the Plantation," delivered by Bill Moyers to the Media Reform Conference in Memphis, TN, 12 January 2007

This week that's my hope for not just our mass media, but Christianity. "You can't kill the story once the people start writing it."

Media first; Moyers recommends a single, simple, meaningful step of action. I am, here and now, making a personal committment to take it and hope you'll consider the same. It's this; make Democracy Now! a primary news source in your household. Many of you can pick up the program on your TV or radio already; for the rest of us, the radio show is freely available every weekday here in English and Spanish - I use the daily "show page at archive.org" to stream the show while I'm making dinner. You can also sign up for the podcast.

What makes this a Jesus-following issue for me? Not politics. Even as a guest representative of CrossWalk America, I cannot stress that enough.

In Marcus Borg's new Jesus book, he makes two relevant moves. First, he thinks that following Jesus is first and foremost about a new way of looking at the world; for example, seeing that in God's Kingdom "the last shall be first," and understanding that "what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me (Jesus)." Second, this new way of seeing is the "narrow path" Jesus speaks of. "Narrow" does not mean "exclusive" or "judgmental," it means counter-cultural, against the status quo, subverting accepted norms and wisdom in favor of God's passion for love and justice.

My friends, in reading this book it is entirely clear to me that our corporate media establishment reflects, and reinforces, the "broad way" of our culture. The way we get our news has a huge impact on our way of seeing. You can bet I'll still check NYTimes.com often enough, but please consider how your practices of consuming information affect your way of seeing. And consider the alternative that Bill Moyers, a man of impeccable journalistic experience and, I believe, of great faith, has suggested as the best available source of a different way of seeing.

Of course, you have not missed the wider implications of "You can't kill the story once the people start writing it." Jesus proclaimed to the poor peasants of Galilee that God was calling them to begin writing their own story, instead of letting the priests write it exclusively. He was killed for it, but the people had already started writing, and the Story could not be killed. Over two thousand years and it has not yet been killed. We see common people in Africa and Asia and America picking Jesus' story up and adding chapters up to this very second. It's dangerous business; it makes the Powers of the Broad Way quite uneasy when the people Write. So we must. In the news and in Christ, we must listen and write not to the powers, but to the people.

-h