After nearly three decades working in communications and narrative in the social sector, I now have a confession to make: I did not, actually, arrive at this career through an inborn passion for social change and impact and doing good. I was raised by Korean parents whose ideas of achievement had everything to do with being a doctor or a lawyer or a businessperson and absolutely nothing to do with public service and social good. The seeds of my social-change-ish career were sown during my liberal arts education (at Brown) and then fertilized with the discontent of being a highly-underpaid administrative assistant in children’s book publishing.
Which then led me to my first public interest job, in criminal justice reform. I worked at an organization that provided alternative sentencing options for young people and for repeat misdemeanor offenders. It diverted young people away from state prison sentences to supervised programs involving counseling, education, and employment training. It helped repeat misdemeanor offenders serve their sentences through community service rather than languishing in a cell in Rikers Island.
But that’s an intellectual explanation of the organization; what I meant to say, it took me a while to realize why the organization mattered. It took a while for the organization’s vital purpose and mission to become real to me. Everything in this world can feel abstract or inconsequential until your brain and your heart make sense of it as something real, and important. In this first job, I had the opportunity to meet many of the young people involved in the program. I was shocked at how young they were. I learned how many of them were caught up in generational cycles of violence and poverty – almost all of them had relatives who had died of AIDS, were addicted to crack, and/or were incarcerated. Their perspectives on their lives were ones of casual acceptance – this is what their lives were, even though I, from a background of immense privilege, would have found these circumstances unendurable. They were equally casual about the looming threats of their deferred prison sentences – subject to resurrection should they fail the program.
Hearing their stories of their lives is one part of what made the organization’s mission real for me. The other part had to do with when I got to know some of them better and they confided their dreams and aspirations to me. One kid wanted to be a writer and when he showed me his short stories and his poetry, I was blown away. Another wanted to be a teacher. I had the heartbreaking realization that these young people possessed the same dreams and aspirations and talents as many other young people in America – the same dreams and aspirations as me, at that time not very far removed from my teenage years. The only differences lay in the circumstances we were born into, and the resources we were afforded as young people, and American attitudes that, frankly, privileged my race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status over theirs.
Over the following years, I repeated this same process with every job I had. From public education to healthcare reform to affordable housing to climate change – these are all issues I first understood intellectually, but didn’t actually care about these issues until they became real to me. And they didn’t become real to me until I learned more about the stories of the real people involved in or impacted by these issues. Realness, in other words, was the thing that converted me from learning and understanding to action. Realness – of the people who were continually being harmed by a particular state of things, or the people who would be helped by a particular policy or program – is what ended up helping me be a better communicator and citizen of the world. (The downside being, as often as I was inspired by real people’s stories, I was also enraged at the absolute nonsense of bad actors and terrible politicians who were aligned on perpetuating a bad status quo – because it benefited them, of course.)
I laid out this long train of thought about the quality of realness in communications and social change in part because of what just happened with the election, of course. The terrible, truly despicable behaviors of Trump and his toadies are not a shocker, this time around, because they’ve been that way since day one. What is truly depressing me, this time around, is how many Americans voted for him ANYWAY. There’s been lots and lots written and said already about the massive right-wing propaganda machine that pumped out disinformation and how Democrats and progressives have nowhere near that level of infrastructure to compete on a messaging/information level. I think there is some truth to that assessment, but I also don’t know what the remedy is – there is a part of my brain that can see how Democrats and progressives could build an equally formidable, massive information infrastructure, but a) it would take years and years; and b) I’m not sure it’s in our DNA to align and coordinate at that level, meaning, at the level of Ted Cruz pretending amnesia about all of Trump’s insults towards him so he can continue to stay in power; and c) I think that Democrats and progressives are rightly obsessed with principles of truth and integrity and I’ve never witnessed a propaganda campaign that was based in, you know, actual facts and honest information. Finally, Joshua Rothman wrote a very pithy analysis for the New Yorker about how technology has enabled a communications environment in which quantity and variety is highly rewarded over quality. And like my point about propaganda campaigns, I just don’t see us playing the long game of pumping out lots and lots of shit just to overwhelm the other shit that’s being pumped out by the bad guys.
But leaving that conundrum aside, I’ve been obsessing, over here in my tiny little cocoon of healing and depression and anxiety, about how each side did on the realness front. The Democrats campaigned on democracy and better policies (I am leaving aside the question of how well they campaigned on Biden’s considerable achievements, because I…don’t think they did, out of fear of being tainted by his image). These are not things that feel real to many American people. The Republicans campaigned on higher-priced eggs and gasoline and people who look different from white, straight, Christian Americans. These are things that feel real to many Americans. Note that I am saying, they felt real, not that they were, actually, real. But feeling real is what made the difference for me in doing a better job as a public interest communicator. And I am wondering whether the realness factor made a difference in the election outcomes, too.
My final observation on this question of realness is this: you may come away from this piece with the idea that I am lecturing communicators — particularly, political and social change communicators — to get their head in the game when it comes to communicating in ways that feel more real. That is not my main point. Sure, I think Democrats made some communications mistakes (and to talk about Democrats as a monolithic entity has always felt deeply wrong to me), but I think the Republicans (same point about the monolith) made some glaring boners, too. In fact, I would argue that most of the MAGA Republicans are terrible communicators, even on the realness front – remember that Trump is the one who talked about drinking bleach and the danger of windmills.
Who I am more interested in lecturing, actually, are the Trump voters. I want to know why they won’t do the work of understanding what’s real, when it comes to voting for people, and linking that understanding of what’s real to the actual consequences of their votes. I’ve been infuriated for years at being told that Americans don’t care about the Supreme Court justice issue as a voting matter. So how real does it actually have to get before they will care? How many stories of women and children bleeding out from miscarriages and forced pregnancies will it take before it gets real?
Sure, I’ll cut MAGA voters a little slack when it comes to wrapping their selfishly preoccupied brains around abstract concepts like democracy and justice and equity and fairness. But I simply won’t, can’t, cut them any slack when it comes to ignoring the very real vile actions of Trump as a person and a human being. If you can’t understand, okay, oppression and authoritarian rule, then at the very least, can you understand that this man committed sexual assault? Lied about how much money he had, repeatedly? Cheated and stole from tons of people?
For the nearly 80 million people who voted for Harris/Walz, it comforts me that all of you, at least, have the imagination and the patience to truly learn about and vote on what is real. That all of you did what I did in my respective jobs – that even though you, yourself, might not be a recent immigrant or a parent with a trans child or a woman or a person of color, you can imagine the very real consequences of a Trump administration on groups of people who are not you. I honestly don’t know what it will take to help the other half of the country understand what is real, and what matters. But I think we’ve got to start figuring it out.
Minna Jung Consulting 