Hey Dad, Tell me the story about the time

Political correctness, thought police and intellectual terrorism are synonyms. The difference is how much we want the term to be socially accepted. Before technology allowed instant international communication, it was possible to have regional meanings for words and phrases and the need to control the perceptions of others focused on the people around us. Those days are over. Words are not the thing they represent. They are a symbolic presentation of a lifetime's experience and what we mean when we use words will change as are experience changes. Obviously, with words being so imprecise, we compensate to overcome the lack of clarity. Storytelling puts our experience into the words that we choose and helps to make our messages easier to understand.

I am a father. Keep that sentence to the strict biological definition and there are no problems, but as soon as you allow memories of your parents or your child rearing years to spice the conversation, the word has left the simple sentence behind. One of the reasons that we celebrate Mother's Day and Father's Day is to make the effort to honor the ritual meaning of mother and father and again, we do this by telling stories. The stories we tell define what we are as a culture; the values that hold us together as a society. This year, memories of fathers get more difficult for me with each super cell that spins destruction across the nation's midsection. Since each of us is greater than the sum of our stories, my experiences as a father, as a graduate student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and several close encounters with tornadoes are essential to know what I mean when I say that I am a father.

Calculating the Value of Education Involves the Sum of the Stories

A friend is retiring from his counselling practice after 40 years, much of it spent working with fathers' difficulties relating to their children after divorces. His success provided him many opportunities to present his approaches and techniques to various groups across the country. He was encouraged by colleagues to write his techniques and present them to universities where the approach could be shared with students preparing for careers in counselling. He prepared the material and sent it to faculties at several institutions in the hopes of sharing his experience. He was told politely that his models were oriented to men and did not fit with the current view that a reliance on “male perspective” was detrimental to women and, regardless of the practical success, it could not be a part of a university curriculum.

Anecdotes of education are everywhere this time of year as students mark achievements and many include the influence of politically correct education. All of those stories of academic success are tempered this year with the stories of the debts incurred while earning those degrees. When Peter Thiel added his voice to the growing concern that the next financial bubble will be student loans, a new thread of stories has been added that questions the value of a college education. Federal policy supporting student loans may be the new flash point in our current economic malaise and political conversation is now being painted in stories that have the theme “a college education is not worth it.” Reducing the dynamic economic issues to stories of students that support a particular political view can be seen in blogs like Beneath the Wheel:

Sadly, this downward spiral is primarily an issue that can only be addressed by the liberal Democrats. The Republican right has failed at every subject save for law and finance, and prefers an illiterate population it can more easily manipulate through flawed logic and reasoning. Hence the propensity to cut public education, especially for those in greatest need.

Terrorism of the body and the Mind

The past ten days scattered our attention and focused my thoughts on the reason for Story Chip. Osama Bin Laden's death and the wave of spin coming from Washington, complaints about the use of the word “Geronimo” as a code by the Navy seals, the resignation of the President of the American College of Surgeons and Sprint pulling an advertisement showing a man in red dress all demonstrate how desperately we cling to the meaning of events and symbols. We fight to preserve the “proper” interpretation from our point of view. We make every effort to control the perceptions of others.

Collecting the stories, the history, of individuals serves an understanding that we can never control what others think. At best, we manage opportunities to negotiate the meaning of our lives. We negotiate from our experiences by telling our stories with the hope that lessons learned will survive and shape the future. Each of the stories in Story Chip provides a taste of someone's struggle to understand and maintain their own meaning and relationship to their culture.

A mother's Story Chip that is only partly written

Over wine and pizza, the discussion turned to mother's day and more particularly, mother's. There was no agreement on anything during that conversation except that all of us had a different experience with our mothers and very different memories and of course it did not help that half of the participants in the conversation were mothers themselves or that only one of us had a mother that was still living.

There are so many stories of what it means to be a parent and how much that has changed in the last fifty years. The fragile nature of these stories came back to me while helping a friend clear the remaining furniture and keepsakes from the home of her aunt who had recently passed away. Among the final pieces was this yarn on canvas still life.

On the back, printed on the brown kraft frame backing, was the following description:

This was done during the summer of 1973, while watching the Watergate hearings on television.

When you look at this, remember the corruption, burglary, perjury that took place in the name of a higher cause, i.e. the re-election of Richard Nixon.

Was this a mother's story? An artist's? Story Chip exists to record these stories. 

Already on Story Chip:

A mother who lost her son in an accident

A woman that keeps the memories alive

A Thanksgiving trip with mom

Artist and mother

By the way, you are invited to share your stories of your mother on Story Chip. She will love your thinking of her.

First Post

Story Chip is still a growing experiment in not entirely social media with both Twitter and Facebook identities that just do not address all situations. Our blog may well become our soap box to promote the value of all the stories that can be told in a format the encourages universal participation. We would all like to be able to control how our stories are told, but events and perspectives make that impossible. For example, this week marks the anniversary of the arrest of John Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee. What do we remember of John Scopes? How do modern Republicans feel about the fact that it was the Democrats that defended the biblical version at that trial? Has this story gotten lost in the depictions on stage and film?

While many of the stories from Dayton, TN are lost, each day provides new opportunities of inclusion of people and their stories. Behind the headlines about the death of Osama bin Laden is the Apache demand for an apology from the Navy for using "Geronimo" as a code word for communicating the status of the team's effort in Afghanistan. Geronimo has been the subject of so many movies and books that it is unlikely that one more story will have a huge impact on how he is seen. What story are the tribal leaders hoping to protect? What are the stories that still need to be told?

At Story Chip, we do not pretend that there is one version, a single "true" story of a person or an event, and we have no delusions about "setting the record straight". Our hope is that by offering a forum for telling the stories of our lives that a richer and dynamic understanding be available. Where are the stories of John Scopes family and how that trial changed their lives? Can we share the stories of the Apache tribes to better understand the times that created a legendary figure?

This blog will focus on the need and processes for collecting our histories and sharing them.