What Story Do You Want to Be In?

            As stories go, there's a big one taking shape in the United States that every U.S. voter should be paying attention to. It's being woven out of many chapters and vignettes, by our presidential candidates. When the candidates speechify and approve their advertising, they're  each trying to create a compelling story that persuades us to vote for them.

            That's part of what political strategists mean when they talk about the "narrative" to be developed for the candidate. Basically, it's story-telling. The strategists want us to buy the story the candidate tells. But as voters, we need to do more: we need to think about the rest of the story, not just the part the candidate is telling us. We need to imagine the details; we need to consider the various ways the plot might develop. We need to ask: what will our country look like if this person is our next president?

            A political speech or advertisement is like a movie teaser. When we watch a trailer for a film, we know that we're getting bits that are meant to pique our curiosity so we'll go see the movie. We also know those bits are taken out of context. Often we imagine the different ways the piece of a scene we're shown might fit into the story.

 Hunger Games: a not unimaginable story

            A movie is entertainment.  If we guess wrong about the bits and pieces, it's irrelevant to our lives. But a presidential election has consequences. It's all very well, for example, for a candidate to thumb his or her nose at convention and "shoot from the hip." But what does that mean in the context of the real world? As an example, if we need to get cooperation from several fishing nations to secure the future of threatened Atlantic fish stocks, do ill-considered insults bring everyone to the table?

            What does it mean for governing if the President exaggerates a threat or departs from the facts so far as to completely misrepresent reality?  Frightened people are liable to accept, if not exactly agree to, suspension of fundamental rights in the interest of their safety. A candidate willing to frame the story he or she is telling in a way meant to scare folks is no less likely to do so once the presidency is attained. What does that mean for free discussion? For protest and assembly? For freedom from unreasonable search and seizure?

            History shows us some of the possible plot lines: scare stories led to the internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor; in Germany in the 30s, Nazi propagandists made up specious claims about Jews and manipulated their gradual marginalization and final incarceration and murder, extending these tactics to  other "unacceptable" minorities; fabrication of non-existent threats from Iraq after 9/11 resulted in an invasion that began destabilization of the entire region....

            So as we watch candidates debate, as we watch campaign advertisements, we need to not only listen to the story each candidate is crafting. We need to also think about where that story might go after the balloons burst s and the votes are cast. We need to ask what the country looks like if that story is made real. We need to ask whether we want to be characters in that story. Because once it's real, it's our story, too.