Fly Over Paranoia

It is no secret that the vast majority of the United States harbors an ugly resentment against "the Coasts". Namely New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. When loose tongues are wagging you'll hear people say terrible things about the Jews in New York, the Gays in San Francisco and the money grubbing demons of immorality who run the entertainment industry in LA. To a certain extent, our fly over brethren are not necessarily wrong to be so bent out of shape- after all the majority of popular entertainment tends to narcissistically focus its energies on New York and LA for its characters and story lines and largely ignores what is going on in the rest of the country.

What fly over states may not know is that a lot of New Yorkers (in particular) are terrified of the rest of the country. New Yorkers are comfortable with their junkies, but the tweakers really scare them. New Yorkers can function (admittedly, it can be begrudgingly...) with Hasidim, Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist and Atheist populations living and working together- but the Evangelicals are enough to make the average New Yorker want to duck into a Satanist S & M parlor for safe harbor. We have religion here, but most New Yorkers would feel uncomfortable being confronted by a highway sign telling them to repent- regardless of their religious affiliation.

We fear.

That's the bottom line. Anything that is unfamiliar causes anxiety and anxiety can cause any human to jump to irrational and illogical conclusions.

Yesterday I was watching some interviews on YouTube with West Virginians about the recent primary. I'll admit that listening to these opinions made my heart race and I began to perspire. Just listening to these different perceptions caused my body to have a mild stress reaction. I wanted to scream and shake them. One woman insisted that Obama was Muslim and she didn't like that. When the interviewer corrected her and told her that he is NOT a Muslim she just closed her eyes, shook her head and said, "I don't agree with that" as if the facts were somehow able to rearrange themselves by the force of her opinion. I was angry and I wanted to reach into the screen and throttle her. Her resistance to the facts that have been available for years (the man has published two very personal books detailing his upbringing and influences for crying out loud!) made me angry and scared. I then commented to my husband that Obama probably made the right choice to concede West Virginia and not make a glut of personal appearances there because they might have shot him on the spot.

Of course- that was MY FEAR talking.

Not everyone who thinks a certain way is a gun toting radical with an itchy trigger finger. Upon closer inspection, I probably would have found this woman to be someone who was shaken by the horror of 9/11 (who wasn't?) and who has probably never met or even seen a Muslim in person before. I'm sure that the culture of racial division that is still common in some parts of the country- West Virginia reportedly being one of those places- made it difficult for this woman to see in Obama what some other people see in him. It is so much safer to take in only the information that conforms with your world view and act on that. I've done that with her. It conforms with my world view to think that she is an idiot redneck. Whereas, she may be a woman who has found herself faced with a myriad of economic and social challenges that are now foreign to her. In the last decade, the world has become a much scarier place. Can I blame her for trying to protect herself from perceived threats? Isn't that what we all do? Isn't that why I will not be considering West Virginia as a vacation spot anytime in the near future?

My point in discussing this is not to deal with the election, necessarily. Rather it is to bring up empathy. Empathy is a powerful thing - not just in personal relations or politics but in storytelling. Storytelling, as you may have noticed, is one of my chief concerns. Recently, I read a screenplay about domestic violence. (Sadly, I read a lot of scripts about domestic violence and more than a few of them fit this particular description...) I found it cliche and since it lacked any real insight into the characters' behavior I wondered why anyone would want to watch such a thing. The screenwriter had written the script based on memories of incidents that happened to his neighbors and his parents' friends as he was growing up. He had already formed an opinion of these people and he wrote the script to pass judgement on them. That was clear from the first scene. Since he lacked any empathy for the characters he was able to write this orgy of violence and insult that bordered on the pornographic. He had become so obsessed with the imagery of violence that he neglected to motivate it in any understandable way. It was kinky in its lack of compassion for the characters and their plight and worse yet- it tried to pass off its judgement of the characters as some sort of moral high ground. The voice of the writer was smug and superior. So I asked him- if you don't struggle to understand and feel for these people, then why should I? And if you don't want your audience to care for these people, what do you expect your audience to walk away with? What will they learn about the characters? What will they learn about themselves? If they walk away with a feeling of superiority over these characters haven't you just given your audience permission to ignore what you profess to shine a light on?

To his credit, this screenwriter heard me out and went back to re-writes. It takes a bold writer to do that. It takes a brave person to stretch themselves to try to understand the incomprehensible. That is what a writer needs to do. That is what an actor needs to do. Circumstance can conspire to make monsters of us all and if we want to fight that- if we really want to become better people we need stories that challenge us to empathize. I'm not pimping any kind of moral relativism here- as some have accused me in the past. There is a difference between understanding and condoning. But if you understand what you are up against you will understand how to put up a resistance. Especially if the monster that emerges surprises you by emerging from within.