Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

There’s Nothing Holy About Storytelling (She Had Me at ‘Flouncing’)

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Rebecca Solnit, interviewed by The New York Times over the weekend, aid what I’ve been muttering for 15 or 20 years of hearing otherwise sensible communication teachers portray storytelling—or “story,” as they preciously call it—as somehow more moral than other forms of communication:

It’s always important to recognize that stories can be destructive, imprisoning. They can obscure the truth as well as reveal the truth. There’s this period a while back when people were flouncing around with this, Aren’t stories wonderful? And there are stories to justify white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction. The right has its stories, which the fact that this regime has to lie constantly says a lot about who they are. But yeah, stories can be destructive. A lot of stories can oversimplify. I do often see the stories people on the left tell, and the left, I think, is a lot of different things, not a monolith, as very driven by their own version of sectarianism criticism, grievance, often stories of oversimplification. Everyone in that category was like this, and everyone in this category is like that. … So, yeah, I think the idea that stories are these magical devices that will do all our work for us is itself a bad story.

Friday Happy Hour Video: Sports Parents Could Be More Honest With Ourselves if Any Parents Could Be More Honest With Ourselves

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In a commentary on PBS News Hour about a decade ago, the writer Daniel Pink made what might be the soundest argument I’ve ever heard, that no one will ever heed.

“Let’s ban parents—all parents, not just the wackos—from attending their kids’ games. Let’s step off the sidelines and climb down from the bleachers, and make youth sports a parent-free zone.”

Hear Pink out.

You know he’s right. Or at least, he has a point.

Yet, Pink tells me that PBS commentary generated “more hate mail than almost anything else I’ve done in the last 20 years.”

Why? Because it touches a molar nerve. Since I’ve been getting to know the sports parenting world in order to introduce Soccer Dad to it, I’ve encountered universal self-professed parental gobsmackery about the economics of travel sports, and how they got into this mess. In the book, I even join in:

So why do parents who can afford to pay for it, put up with it? Because—it is starting to dawn on my thick soccer dad head just now—we are secretly fine with it. We secretly think it’s a pretty good deal.

Most of us aren’t actually paying for our kids’ travel sports in order to recoup our monies through college sports scholarships. We’re paying purely for the hope that they might attain college athletic glory, which is worth a lot all by itself, especially when you throw a few status points in with it. And even better, we get to bop around the country on grand adventures with our preteen and teenage kids and watch them play sports! (As opposed to other parents, whose kids don’t go anywhere with them—won’t be seen with them—and spend their teenage years in their bedrooms doing God knows what on their phones.)

What kind of parent with the means wouldn’t pay $10K a year for that?

But that’s why sports parents don’t dig Daniel Pink’s point. Because it reminds them that they’re participating in all this as much out of selfishness as much as generosity.

Why is that so hard for parents to admit to themselves? Must parents—not just sports parents, all parents—until the very last generation before the sun goes out position ourselves as pure martyrs, selflessly sacrificing for our kids? Why can’t sports parents and violin parents alike just say: Our kid loves to play, and we love to watch and none of us can think of anything better to do with our money and our time.

As I write in Soccer Dad about our travel-soccer years, “Ultimately, this didn’t feel like good money after bad; it seemed like good money after good—always worth the money and the hassle and the mental strain—for all of us.”

We all want this joy to be as large as possible and we want it to last as long as possible. So we’re doing whatever it takes to do that!

So hell no we won’t skip the games, Mr. PBS Commentator Guy! Watching the games is what we’re paying for!

That would be the only honest rebuke to Pink’s commentary, it seems to me—and probably, the only one he didn’t get.