You know what irks me? Movies where the characters are one-dimensional. The bad guys are bad–uh, just because–and the good guys are perfect.

You know what gets me irate? Media (read: journalism or stuff posing as such) that does the same.

I once took a screenwriting workshop where the teacher suggested to all the students that we create a character breakdown before beginning to write the story. This breakdown included details like physical appearance and occupation, but also probed for wants, goals, fears, conflicts and disappointments. She said with her movies, she can tell you exactly why a character does something—and connect that action to something related to the character’s personality, upbringing, fears, insecurities, and so on. She wants her characters to be as real as they can possibly be. Human.

I know that these days real is becoming hard to decipher.

But what isn’t changing: Humans are complex creatures. We rarely do things just because. We come with history and childhoods and environmental influences that shape who we are, how we think, and the actions that we take.

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Still. Let’s not sacrifice context for sound bites. Nor paint reality as utopia or hell.

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But lately, and maybe it’s just a sign of the instant times we live in or our overall propensity towards laziness, you can turn on certain national broadcasts and count how many sloppy good vs. evil snippets that are being offered up as reporting and “getting the story.” Which is a shame.

Well, dangerous actually when you think of how many of us take our cues, shape personal perspectives, and vote based on these superficial representations.

Media at its best can be a tool to contextualize. You know, media that highlights a town that is only known as X through popular representations and yet explore and show, that it is also A, B, C, D, E…

Or media that shows that a certain art form is more than just “loud music,” and “gangsters” or that a religion’s only face is that of a “terrorist.”

Great fiction does this. So do wonderful television shows and compelling documentaries, as does expert, thorough reporting. They delve into the story behind the story and explore the complexity of the person, place, or thing and show the layers of environment, background, and history.

Completeness. But I reckon it’s becoming harder and harder to be complete in our instant, bite-sized world.

Still. Let’s not sacrifice context for sound bites. Nor paint reality as utopia or hell.

*Photo from the movie High Noon. 1952, Stanley Kramer Productions.

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Felicia Pride is an independent content producer, creative entrepreneur, and educator. She’s the executive editor of inReads.com, an initiative of WETA and the first community dedicated to “social readia.” She’s also a co-creator at 2MPower Media which focuses on projects that connect media, entertainment, and education. In addition to writing six books, Felicia has launched a youth film project, taught in the South Bronx, developed curricula for books/films, helped to launch an online teen book club, and completed her first feature screenplay which goes into production this summer. Currently, she is a fellow at the Hip-Hop Education Center at NYU. Visit her online at www.feliciapride.com or on Twitter at @feliciapride.

You can read Felicia’s posts every other Wednesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

What’s Our Circle of Compassion?

I was sitting all the way at the other end of a large table from Delores in Champaign, Illinois, and I needed to do everything I could not to let the tears fall from my eyes. Here was a woman desperately struggling to keep her head above water in today’s economy and her acts of compassion were simply overwhelming to me. Throughout Main Street America, her story is not uncommon.

Over the course of our three-hour conversation, I learned about Delores and her life. I was in Champaign to talk with a cross-section of people for our new Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street study we’re undertaking in conjunction with the Kettering Foundation.

Delores, a middle-aged, African-American, single mother is employed as a bus driver, where she earns less than $30,000 a year. And she is a Republican. Like so many Americans we’ve been talking with, Delores is doing all she can to make ends meet. And yet, all the talk of a “bad economy” in nightly news reports, findings from the latest public opinion surveys, and daily highlights of cold unemployment facts, sorely miss the point of people’s plight and aspirations. Indeed, many of the remedies being proposed to address people’s concerns seem utterly disconnected from what people are actually wrestling with.

For these issues are fundamentally about people and their lives, their hopes and what keeps them awake at night, their guts churning with anxiety. In 25 years of doing this work, I have never encountered such a time when people have been so rattled and scared about their future – where they talk so openly about their fear of losing a job, their family in free-fall as their earnings drop precipitously from $60,000 to below $30,000 and share their worries about not being able to hold onto their modest home, bought after many years of scraping together hard-earned dollars.

Delores and her fellow Illinoisans expressed frustration, even anger about the current situation. They believe the wealthy and powerful are taking care of themselves and have turned their backs on the rest of the country. They feel screwed, left behind, discarded. There is a sense of humanity that is being lost in this process–a sense of connection between and among people. In this abyss is a sense that we are no longer in the same boat together, part of something larger than ourselves.

But as strongly as Delores expressed such concerns, there was an equal fierceness about her compassion for others. Through the discussion, I came to learn Delores’ son has learning disabilities, and she’s concerned that the local school system is passing him from grade to grade without regard for whether he is actually learning anything. She expressed her concerns not by using politically correct language, or with a sense that she had been unduly burdened, but with a bluntness of acknowledging reality and the need to find the right support for her son. She discussed how she pushes and prods the local school system to create a good learning environment in which he can grow. Again, she did not speak about what she was owed or make arguments about her “rights” or ask for any hand-outs.

Then, amid this story, I learned that Delores had taken in a foster child, who she has now adopted, and of her love for this child. She matter-of-factly told stories about how she reaches out to others in the community to ensure they are making a go of things; about how people need to watch out for each others’ kids; about how we must care for the less fortunate among us.

On one level, Delores has little in material goods, but on another, so much in her heart.

What was so striking to me about her compassion, and that of many others, too, is not a kind of warm, cuddly, Hallmark-card like sentimental feeling one might expect, but a burning commitment to keep her dignity, to care about others, not to give in to larger currents that suggest one should turn away from others only to care for themselves.

One of our challenges today is to find ways to expand the circle of compassion within our communities and society if we, as a nation, are to move ahead. Delores is a reminder of what that really means. Despite the challenges that beset her, she has chosen to expand and embrace her circle.

Now, who are you including in your circle of compassion?

Delores’s story is the first in a series we are calling A View from Main Street which will feature stories of everyday Americans throughout the country. These stories will be featured together in a national study called Citizens and Politics II slated to be published later this year. You can read Citizens and Politics I here.

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A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people’s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We’re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

Top image from Wikimedia Commons user: Ardfern.

Every year, Jacksonville Beach holds the Summer Jazz Concert Series at the Seawalk Pavilion, an open-air amphitheater. The series consists of a monthly concert over June, July and August. Although I’ve lived in Jacksonville now for more than twenty years, yesterday was the first time that I experienced the event. It took my parents visiting from Massachusetts and staying in a hotel next door to the venue for me to attend. I like to think that I fully support and participate in local culture, but when I asked myself why it took so long to arrive at this particular one, it came down to appeal, maybe even transcending my comfort zone. In other words, smooth jazz doesn’t do it for me. But the proximity made a walk over a must; I mean the horns were greeting us all the way to our patio and the mass of festive event-goes made it a no brainer.

My story’s conclusion is probably pretty predictable, we had a great time. I was shocked to see the wide range of people, seemingly from all walks of life, congregated and enjoying the concert together. And it didn’t matter that the particular music being played didn’t resonate with me, I was experiencing something with many members of my community that I typically wouldn’t. Like many, I tend to stay in my cultural comfort zone. The music itself IS important, or whatever the central draw is, but it’s not everything. All of us have little margin in life and the idea of filling that sacred bit of time with something you don’t particularly enjoy is, well, rather unappealing. But it’s more of an urging to occasionally break through those cultural comfort zones to explore all the different facets that makes your community what it is, and jumping head first into those unknown pockets.

A number of these types of stories have revealed themselves in State of the Re:Union episodes and features. In our first season, we did a video podcast feature that centered around community music stories called Sounds of the Re:Union. My own cultural victory (is that a bit of an overstatement?), reminded me of some of the stories that we covered in the Sounds series, stories where people forced themselves to try something new, to get involved with something they had zero experience

The Milwaukee Ukulele Club

The Milwaukee Ukulele Club consists of a group of people who come together to play the small instrument and find a meaningful, positive social outlet that creates a unique sense of community in their lives.  We spoke with the club’s founder and leader Lil Rev, as well as members Nina and Cheryl Ann.

Old Time Music in Los Angeles

Old Time American music probably conjures images of Appalachia, but we found that Old Time culture is bringing community together in Los Angeles. Discover how old and young are coming together to create an exciting movement and in turn, removing some of the social walls people have put up between each other.

Operation New Hope is such an incredible organization and has even become a national model for solving recidivism challenges. It was originally explored in our episode, Jacksonville – The Bold New City of the South? – and SOTRU guest contributor, Alina Kodatt, caught up with the organization’s founder, Kevin Gay, last December to see what had changed for them since the episode. We want to be sure that you didn’t miss it! Additionally, we will soon be starting a new feature on our website called Radio Re:Visit. It will highlight some of the people and organizations that were part of our radio episodes, so that we can get a sense for where they are now and if anything has changed since we last spoke.

Below is Alina’s conversation with Kevin that we originally published on 12.06.10:

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In State of the Re:Union’s third pilot episode, Al Letson explored his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. In that episode Al introduced readers to Operation New Hope (ONH), an organization located in the historic downtown neighborhood of Springfield. Focused on bringing hope to ex-offenders through employment and rebuilding dilapidated homes in the community, ONH has received national attention for their model of bringing help and hope to their community. We were so inspired by their story the first time around that we recently caught up with ONH director Kevin Gay to get an update on their efforts. (more…)

Why do some communities seem better able to handle challenges or rebound from disasters, both manmade and natural, more quickly and effectively than others?

That’s a question the National Civic League took up years ago when the organization was undergoing a period of soul-searching about its mission. Its historic role as an advocacy organization for local government reform, nonpartisan, professional management and model city charters seemed less pressing than it had been in 1894, when it was founded and cities were famously corrupt and inefficient.

After a brainstorming session and retreat in 1987, NCL’s friends and board members were asked to come up with some new ideas during the annual National Conference on Governance. One idea the organization came up with was a concept known as “civic infrastructure.”

Civic infrastructure is the sum of local capacities that communities have to come together around common goals and implement them—things like “levels of citizen participation,” “intergroup relations” and “charitable giving and volunteering.” Communities with health civic infrastructures tend to be the one that handle challenges and crises most effectively.

Next week, we will be holding our biggest event of the year, the annual All-America City Awards (AAC), a program that asks the question: ‘What’s working in American communities?’ When AAC was started in 1949, it was mostly an award for government reform and professional city management, but over the years it has become more about the less formal mechanisms that make community democracy work—civic infrastructure.

Dakota County, Nebraska, is one of 26 finalist communities for the 2011 All-America City Awards.  (Counties, neighborhoods and metro regions are also eligible to for the award). In their application, Dakota County said their two most pressing challenges were a lack of affordable higher education opportunities (colleges and universities) and economic development.

These very common problems for rural towns on the high plains were exacerbated last year when the local meat packing plant closed its door, throwing about 1,450 workers into the ranks of the unemployed, many of whom were non-English speakers.

The county has responded by increasing its post secondary education programs a partnership between Northeast Community College, Wayne State College and South Sioux City to build a new College Center in South Sioux City. The community also built a new Industrial Park in the hopes of attracting new employers into the area. (You can read about these community projects and others by visiting the All-America City blog at www.allamericacityaward.com.

Last week we received an e-mail from the grants coordinator for the City of South Sioux City informing us that Dakota County, which is on the banks of the Missouri River, is facing a “500 year flooding event that is set to reach its peak on June 14-15, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.”

So the Dakota County delegation will not be attending the 2011 All-America City Awards, which will be held June 15-17 downriver in Kansas City, Missouri. They’ll be staying home to deal with a new crisis, which is exactly what they should be doing and wish them the best.

This has been a crazy year for weather—unimaginably destructive tornadoes in the South and Missouri, terrible flooding on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But communities that have strong civic infrastructures will be able to weather these crises and come back stronger than ever. I’m confident Dakota County will be one of those. I’m equally confident that they’ll be back for another shot at the All-America City Awards.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Can art change the world?

That’s what street artist JR asked himself last year when the TED conference said it would award him a $100,000 prize to change the world. A photographer from Paris, JR has made a reputation for pasting giant photographic portraits on urban surfaces like buildings, trains, bridges and rooftops. Working mostly in poor neighborhoods such as the slums of Kenya and the favelas of Brazil, he befriends local residents and uses them as models for his public art projects, which tell stories of the downtrodden or voiceless.

Of course, JR is not your typical community do-gooder. The photographer – who only goes by his initials because his work often involves criminal trespassing – got his start as a 15-year-old graffiti artist, writing his name on Parisian rooftops with a few good friends. After finding a cheap camera on the subway, he decided to document their graffiti adventures – taking photos, making photocopies and plastering them on building walls. “The city was the best canvas I could imagine,” he told audience members during his TED talk in March.

Eventually, JR turned his artistic focus outward and began to document other people.  In the past few years he has plastered colossal portraits of Parisian thugs in bourgeois French neighborhoods; juxtaposed images of Palestinian and Israeli faces on security fences in the Middle East; and showcased photographs of dignified women in areas of conflict, places where females are often targets of violence.

Today his work is spreading, and with funds from his TED prize, JR is getting more people involved. Through his Inside Out Project, he invites people to send him their own photographic portraits so he can enlarge them and mail them back. In Tunisia, participants pasted portraits on billboards that used to boast images of their former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.  In Brooklyn, photographs of 11 immigrant shopkeepers are displayed on uneven steps in Parks Slope, protesting a nearby development project that is forcing them out of business.

Brooklyn’s Inside Out installation is just one of many interesting public art projects in the United States right now. In Boston, artist Tim Devin hangs posters on phone poles and other public fixtures to feature poetry, demographic data (like income level by neighborhood), or community-driven questions (“Do you identify with where you live?”). In New Orleans, artist Candy Chang transformed an old abandoned house into a giant chalkboard on which locals can write what they hope to achieve in their lifetimes. Called “Before I Die,” her art project has drawn a wide variety of response – like “I want to live in another country,” “go 200 mph,” “finish school,” or “tell my mother I love her” – helping people see what matters most to their neighbors.  (Visit Chang’s website to see her other art projects, including the Hypothetical Development project I blogged about a few months ago).

So from oversized portraits to posters and chalkboard houses, can art change the world? Can it change our communities? “Art is not supposed to change the world [or] change practical things,” said JR in his TED talk. But, he added, “It changes perceptions.” Posted on rooftops, stairs and walls, his enlarged photographs force local residents to confront uncomfortable questions about gentrification, discriminations and poverty, and they create a powerful statement about the community’s identity for passing visitors. They also give people with little money or power an opportunity to attain their own creative agency – not just viewing the art, but making it themselves.

Whatever form it takes, I think public art can give us a better understanding of the communities we inhabit, the people we share them with, and our potential to connect with one another. “What we see changes who we are,” said JR. “And when we act together, the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts.”

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Samantha Michaels is a senior at Northwestern University with a double major in journalism and international studies. A Chicago native, she hopes to become a foreign correspondent or travel writer someday, and during college has tried to see as many new places as possible.

You can read her posts on State of the Re:Union’s website every other Wednesday.