My gosh Anand Giridharadas makes sense. He’s a great public speaker, because he’s a great storyteller. He talks about using storytelling to make meaning from what happens in people’s everyday lives, connecting it to the politics of their country. For example, how not being able to chat with the Spanish-speaking cashier at Walgreens can become a story that connects an aging American to an anti-immigrant political policy.
Please have a listen. And let’s start finding the stories that bring actual freedom, democracy, even fun! to all the changes in the world, instead of the stories that are making people afraid that all these changes (climate action, racial equality, demographics, feminist movment, etc.) are making them lose their way of life. When Tucker Carlson spends an hour arguing that putting the female M&M in flats instead of heels is a war on ‘sexiness’…it is building on an intuition that is out there: that equality, progress and power for women will lead to the erosion of a certain picture of women that they grew up with.
There will be no persuading anyone “if we’re not telling the equal and opposite story that yes, you’ve lost some number of high heels, but you’ve gained an ocean of talent, power, dreams, promise and ingenuity that we’ll get by doubling the fraction of people empowered to do their best in the world.”
Let’s find these stories, yeah? For democracy’s sake.