who tells whose story?

I wrote this article just under a year ago. With NSW about to hit 20K COVID cases a day (or maybe not, they just shifted the goalposts so it’s harder to get a definitive diagnosis), Prime Minister Scott Morrison vanished from sight (again; he does this every crisis), and Australia on the cusp of an election year, the question of whose story gets publicised, promoted, highlighted is a big thing. To him who has, more shall be given: when people know the story, they invest in the story — time, energy, attention, resources.

Whose story is being told?

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10th January, 2021

I’m not a journalist.

I think it’s best to get that out of the way now. I don’t know about journalistic standards, or how stories get made, or what sacrifices must be made to the editor gods to get one’s stories through to publication in a conventional publication.

So I don’t know how themes and topics are picked. Which ones get front page billing, which ones get sidled off to ‘special interest’, which ones get carved from the whole turkey down to a single slice of dry white meat on a plate with no gravy.

Obviously, there’s current affairs and topics of interest. As I type this, mainstream media is chewing over the ‘how did this happen?’ question of the Capitol Hill insurrection attempt, like a cow with their cud. And about as swiftly and inventively as a cow does such things, which is to say, not at all swiftly or inventively.

The insurrection attempt is Big News. Everyone wants to be In The Know, right? And what will follow is weeks upon weeks upon weeks of retrospectives of disgruntled white people who are bitter that they aren’t top dog anymore and scared that they’ll lose their freedoms and who will lash out at anyone who they might be able to hurt, if only to make someone else also feel scared and bitter and retaliatory.

Yes, yes, we know this song. It’s, like, every country music song ever? Every columnist in a conservative newspaper? Every article post-election 2016 that went and asked Trump voters whyyyyy?

Can we stop singing that tune? Can we change the channel? Can we choose another story?

I don’t need to know whyyyyy. I don’t even want to know whyyyyy. It’s not that I don’t care about these people but I’d like to highlight others— people who did something that mattered.

Can we talk about Georgia and its voters? About the on-the-ground, get-out-the-vote organisers there? Stacey Abrams has done great work, yes, and every time someone praises her she points out that there were others on the ground, too?

I like that. I like someone who can say, Thank you, and also you should thank these people!

I think we should be thanking ‘those people’ by telling their stories and sharing what they did. Tell the stories of the community organisers, who went around and got the vote out. It’s pretty clear that getting the vote out works to reinforce democracy — even when you don’t like the results. Community organisers in Florida got the Hispanic vote out. They used the spectre of ‘socialism’ with the immigrant-background population to persuade the Hispanics that Trump is on their side. And so Florida went Republican. In the same way, Stacey Abrams and other organisers like her got the vote out in the counties of Georgia when it counted. And boy howdy! Did it count!

Tell the stories of the Georgia organisers —Abrams, sure, but there’s many others apart from Abrams. Talk about the problems they encountered, the dangers they faced, the setbacks they overcome. And then take us to that grand finish moment when Warnock was declared, when Ossoff was declared, when they realised that Georgia’s not a Republican state, just a state full of suppressed voters.

Then let’s hear their stories about what’s next and how others can get involved on the ground.

And then let’s hear about first-time voters who’ve never voted because they never thought it counted. Let’s hear how they felt, knowing that Georgia flipped in a way it hasn’t flipped since the Civil Rights movement when the Dixiecrats took their toys in a huff at the idea that all men are created equal and went to play with the Republicans.

Let’s hear from the elderly people of colour whose parents weren’t allowed to vote because they weren’t the right gender, the right race, the right level of money, and who perhaps finally decided they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, not for themselves but for their grandkids.

Let’s hear from the families who watched their $600 check flit away into the gaping hole of bills and clung to the mirage of a $2000 stimulus, only to see it whittled down to $600 and battered back and forth.

Let’s hear from the people who’ve moved into Georgia from other states for work or love or lifestyle and decided that the state could do with a shaking up.

Let’s hear from the teenagers who heard that Georgia was going to a runoff and went ‘wait, I’m eligible to vote’ and went and registered.

Let’s hear from the bottom of society— the poor, the non-white, the lowly — the people who never thought they’d be able to make a difference, who voted on faith and were repaid in spades — or, at least, the tools to make a better country.

Instead of talking about people who are always talked about, how about we focus on the people who hoped they might make a difference, but didn’t know. They had to take it on faith and trust that their efforts would change the outcome.

Let’s promote and highlight these stories and the people who tell them. Let’s make those who tell these stories people and not merely heroes that we can dismiss when we don’t need ‘saving’ anymore.

‘Representation matters’ is a phrase that’s often heard these days. And it doesn’t just matter for things like race and gender; it matters for things like class and situation.

At this point in time — on the verge of a Democrat president, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House — why try to work out what’s going on in the minds of those who are stuck in the old way of thinking and living?

Let’s learn more about the visionaries who looked ahead, consider how they got to where they are, and then think of how we, too, can change the game.

—

Eliza Hamilton lived for another forty? fifty? years after her husband died. She took up important causes, social welfare, did a whole lot of things that eventually saw fruit — good things, things to do with people and the choices they were able to make, not just money and the way it gets pushed around. And her story is told in the last five minutes of his story.

Admittedly, Hamilton’s story is told because he changed the economic game for the USA — a game that set the US up quite differently to most of the other economies at the time, and which was one of the reasons it was able to become an economic powerhouse over the next few centuries.

But it’s always worth asking: what story are we telling — and whose story is it anyway?