Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world

By David McElroy · October 4, 2019

If I could start my adult life over, I would do some things differently.

Knowing what I know now, I would avoid the newspaper business entirely. I also wouldn’t have spent two decades working in politics. What would I do instead?

I would become a filmmaker, an academic or a psychologist. Those three might sound rather different, but I’ve thought seriously about all three. The more I think consider it, the more sense it makes — because all three are different faces of something I do quite naturally.

You see, I’m a storyteller.

The sculptures you see above in the fountain at Five Points South in Birmingham are collectively called “The Storyteller.” The guy with the goat head is the storyteller himself. It was intended to convey the importance of storytelling in the South’s oral tradition.

Everything I’ve ever done was about storytelling in one way or another. In newspapers, I told stories and helped weave a coherent community narrative as I edited newspapers. In politics, I created narratives about clients which I sold to a gullible public.

If I could start life again, I would use storytelling in a different way. Filmmakers, academics and psychologists are at their best when they tell stories. They weave meaningful narratives to help confused people find their way in a world which is changing.

For a long time, I struggled to find my calling in the form of what I did. Early in life, I felt called to the ministry. Then for a long time, I saw newspapers as a form of calling. After that, I thought I could change the world in a positive way through politics.

I saw those specific roles as a calling. Even though I did the work of all three at one time or another, those forms didn’t seem right. And now I suspect it’s because my calling was never about the form.

It was about the meaning of the stories instead.

The longer I live, the more I have to say that I believe would be useful for individuals and for the decaying culture around us. In a way, I am the “anti-story” in the current culture. I am more like the Old Testament prophet who dramatically shows up — after God forces him to finally obey — and tells the people to repent.

My stories aren’t about sin. They’re not about obedience. They’re not about putting away idols. No, they’re about ideas instead. My stories are about how we — as individuals and as communities — can choose to turn away from the bright and shiny things which are slowly destroying us.

Ultimately, my story is about grounding ourselves in where we’ve come from — the best of the past — and about how we can shed the trappings of the “false self” that we grow up learning to be in order to be accepted.

I don’t glorify the past and I don’t hate change, but the more I understand about how we have gotten to the point where we are as a culture — and the more I see how we’re imploding — the more I realize how desperate many people are for an alternative. Millions and millions of people seem uneasy and unhappy with modern life, but without quite understanding why.

The stories I have to tell lay a narrative for understanding why we’ve felt this way. And they suggest some paths that we as individuals can take to get to somewhere more healthy, even if the rest of the culture continues over a cliff.

A filmmaker can certainly tell these stories. An academic can weave the same narratives to influence public thinking. And a psychologist uses the same sorts of stories to help his clients understand themselves and how they might be able to dig their way out of their problems.

I have a lot that I need to say. I have a powerful message. It feels like a calling. It’s a broad but integrated collection of narratives to help life make sense, for individuals and for the culture. It’s a call to sanity and personal peace.

It’s part psychology. It’s part serious academic thought. It’s part entertainment.

But it’s all storytelling.

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The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

If you have children, it’s important to deal with how they might be feeling as they react to the fears of COVID-19 as the danger grows. There’s a lot of fear among adults right now, but children are even less equipped to handle fears they sense from adults around them. My friend Josh Whitman has experience doing a lot of things and one of them is school administration. Josh and his wife are raising two young sons of their own in a Birmingham suburb, and he’s been thinking a lot for the last few weeks about how this societal fear affects children. He’s written a short article giving some wise and insightful tips with concrete steps you can take to help your children during this time of crisis — things which might not have occurred to me — so I highly recommend it.

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