What story will she tell?
A successful Swedish musician was recently quoted as saying, ” listen to what they say in (television program) Idol and do the reverse! That is my recipe for success.” This comment felt like a sprinkling of cool water in a desert of programs being broadcast by the main Swedish television channels which portray merciless competition as something to be desired. In a society with a reputation for leaving no one behind and which prizes the “lagom” (ordinary), I find this rash of inhumane programs to be puzzling, to say the least. Do some influential people working in Swedish television have a pent-up longing for an unjust society?
While the American side of me says that there is nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition and ambitious goals, I’m getting tired of watching people being put down for show. The Romans did it in the Colosseum by throwing slaves and Christians to starving wild animals, but I thought that we had got past those bad old days. In some ways, we have a more complicated problem on our hands now than ever in the past since wherever we turn, wherever we look, this sad old story is being retold a hundred times by our screens and billboards.
Since the time that people have been able to communicate with one another in an intelligent way, story-telling has been our means for creating culture. One story passed down to the next generation is the starting point of that generation’s values and perceptions. In the past ordinary people - grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers - passed on the stories of families and of the land. Today a comparatively small number of people who believe that we want to watch others being reduced tell us a great many of the stories that shape our values, in particular those of our children. We have greater possibilities to tell our stories and to shape the way that we want our society to be than ever before but the vast majority today are assimilators rather than story-tellers.
Incensed by this situation and the ever-lengthening cues for children needing psychiatric help, I began a project this spring with a few other like-minded women to help children recapture the art of story-telling in Swedish schools. Within a few weeks, I found myself in a classroom with sixteen 11-year-olds telling a story about what it means to help another person feel that they are good enough. This is a tricky subject at best, particularly with all of the Colosseum-style television programs that these children are aware of. Soon we found ourselves in a fantasy world of dwarfs and talking suns which revolved around one true story: if you give a person the chance to show you who they are on their own terms they will usually exceed all of your expectations.
As the children wound their tales it struck me that through this collective effort to recapture an ancient art and make it new we could begin as a society to express the world that we want to live in. It’s the reverse of Idol and I do believe that it is a recipe for the sort of success that most of us would like to be a part of.
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If you are an individual or organization that would like to see this project expand and flourish or simply would like more information, please contact me at info@julielindahl.com.
