by Joshua Gryniewicz

This looks like a job for…a storyteller!
copyright (c) 2003 by Josh Gryniewicz

Once upon a time, stories were far more than just entertainment, tales were told to a people, representing those people. Stories still have power. Though, now, more often than not, they are geared to a specific marketing demographic and often formulated to lack any of the content they should contain. Mass produced pop-culture is composed of the hedonistic highlights of ancient mythology, legend and folklore, while lacking the context to frame them in. In other words, “boobs, bullets and bombs” without any plot.

Stories can be used to heal; they can act as a method for social change, for individual change and they can provide moral lessons. As Joseph Campbell expressed, myth can exemplify the highest attributes of a culture.  It is in this tradition that Happy Feet has started offering a program at local libraries called A Garden of Small Stones, a timely program which offers a collection of tales on human growth, wisdom and dreams. This program explores healing stories from a variety of other cultures, emphasizing coming of age and quests for knowledge in folklore the world over.

A few years ago, in the aftermath of the Colombine school shootings, a parade of professionals and parishioners of outraged parents marched out to address a grieving public who was demanding to know “Why?” Why were our kids shooting up their schools? Why was our society so violent? And what could we do about it? The experts looked desperately to science and agreed for the most part that there were no experts. Neurological reasons, psychosocial reasons, theological reasons were all explored – and all offered answers, in part.

Half formed answers included a lack of morality, the disintegration of the family structure, the disintegration of family values, our violent society, our secular society, and so on. John Wayne, John Rambo, Marilyn Manson and Eminem were all diabolical culprits of this social plague. Droves of activists and lobbyists pressurized Hollywood – demanding change, the FCC launched an intensive, expensive investigation into violence in the media, and the entertainment industry promised woefully to deliver lower body counts.  

Not wanting to be left out of the action, I purchased a soapbox of my own so that I could demand an active response to my half-formed ideas.  Actually, I wrote an article for a rather prominent, progressive, liberally slanted magazine who had gone on record arguing that the aforementioned campaign was a well-disguised form of censorship.  My argument was that this entire debate on violence and censorship was missing a key point, that the focus should not be over decreasing the sex, drugs and violence in the media, but a struggle for the medium. In other words, this should be a battle fought for context, a revolution of poets who needed to demand that the images being contested be put in an appropriate context. It wasn’t the violence that was causing turmoil – it was the frivolous, mass-produced violence that didn’t have a context to house it in.

My soapbox wasn’t strong enough to hold me –however, I received a rather nice, personalized letter from the editor. Despite the fact that they had rejected me, they (or at least this editor) liked my ideas. The only fault of the piece was that it was that it had too many philosophical leanings for the publication, even if it wasn’t an argument for aesthetics and artistic integrity, the readership would probably see it that way.  It went on to say that the arguments I was advancing were “too abstract.”  Personally, I rejected this rejection letter because it was symptomatic of the very issues I was discussing. By rejecting me the publication had given me more credit than an acceptance would have (well not quite, but it sounds good doesn’t it?)

I put aside the soapbox and set to work in the other camp, the seekers who pursued answers rather than preaching them. I created a therapeutic group around some of these concepts of story work and collected data for a study on school related violence. My ideas evolved with the successful outcome of the group, but they stayed true to the theme that had brought me there in the first place. Mass-produced pop-culture was a plague on society that was negatively impacting all of us with an illness of the psyche. This was still not much of an answer by way of empiricism.

Unfortunately, for our society, this is not a commonly held belief.  It lacks an empirical quality, a quantifiable proof, a statistical comfort for most that makes such statements “too abstract.” Yet stories play a profound role in all of our lives, they can be a moral touchstone, a source of inspiration or plant the seeds for more profound thought. This is not a concept that is foreign to storytellers – they understand the power and magic a tale can evoke, but some of the engineers who craft modern tales for television, the big screen or the bestseller’s list refuse to recognize the amazing power they wield.

The truth of the matter is that stories do not provide shelter, they do not combat poverty, war, or emotional trauma nor do they put an end to hunger – but they do have the potential to effect each and every one of these issues.        

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