Pat's Blog

Imagine a picture, a moving picture.
Our baby television show has taken on four stories in our opening month: a radical college program for poor people, the amendment to the S.C. Constitution that would constrict the rights of gays and lesbians, organic and natural practices in farming and cooking, and mothers organizing to promote healthy birth
practices, breast feeding, and other issues around motherhood.
How do we move pictures around all these stories?
Real life, those sounds and pictures and smells and tastes that move through our senses in that world beyond computer screens and television sets, is a much slower pace. We don’t expect the images outside our windows to change every second or every few seconds the way we expect television imagery to change.
Maybe the expectation that the world can change comes from many of us watching television shows, where a ton is accomplished during one broadcast. There is a formula of establishing the characters and place, presenting a problem, and solving it, whether the story line lasts 24 minutes or two hours.
How many times have I said to Luke, my ten year old, while watching TV or a movie, “Don’t worry. The good guys are gonna win.”
I remember John Wayne endorsing Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention saying, “This is one of the good guys.” By implication did he mean Jimmy Carter, of all people, was one of the bad guys?
In our polarized politics, our problems in working together come from our belief that each issue can be divided into good and evil with folks who agree with us wearing white hats, while the other side is demonized, sometimes enough to drop bombs on them.
Lincoln is alleged to have slammed his hand down in the middle of a cabinet meeting when a couple of his secretaries were arguing. He said, “Don’t you gentlemen understand that two people can disagree and both be right?”
That’s a harder and harder pill to swallow in our world of black and white.
We want all decisions made simple. We like what Mark Twain said, (although I think he was kidding,) “In all matters of opinion our opponents are idiots.” Well, this has ended up a long way from where I started.
Please forgive us when we appear to be idiots because we disagree with you. Help us figure out how to tell these stories with moving pictures. And if it is not too much to ask, believe with us that the world really can change for the better even if takes a little longer than the broadcast of a television show.

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