This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women - Hardcover

Jay Allison is one of public radio's most honored producers. He has produced hundreds of nationally broadcast documentaries and features for radio and television. His work has earned him the duPont-Columbia and five Peabody Awards, and he was the 1996 recipient of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding contributions to public radio, the industry's highest honor. He was the curator and producer of This I Believe on NPR and he produces The Moth Radio Hour. Before his career in broadcasting, Jay was a theater director in Washington, D.C. He is also the founder of the public radio stations for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod where he lives.

Dan Gediman is the executive producer of This I Believe. His work has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Fresh Air, Marketplace, Jazz Profiles, and This American Life. He has won many of public broadcasting's most prestigious awards, including the duPont-Columbia Award.

Introduction

Jay Allison

Dangling at the end of each essay in this book is an implied question: "What would you say?"

What would you say in five hundred words to capture a core principle that guides your life? Can you name a belief that underlies your actions? In the discovered truths of your experience, what abides?

This question is more important than what one thinks of a given essay. There are seventy- five of them here, after all. As readers, each of us is bound to take issue with some or be stirred by others. And your reactions won’t be the ones of the person sitting next to you; one man’s cliché is another man’s revelation. Often, I find that an essay may not strike me one day, but will carry meaning months later when my own circumstances have changed.

As editors, we have aimed to be as inclusive as possible in our selection, choosing statements from teenagers to those in their nineties, and from a wide range of profession, background, and experience all over this country. You’ll find writing from the famous and the unknown. Many essays arrived over the transom; some we solicited directly.

There are statements here from Nobel Prize winners, high school students, a diner waitress, an Iraq War veteran, a nun, an astronaut, a professional skateboarder, well- known artists, writers, and scientists, a drug addict, a dental technician, a former Guantánamo interrogator, and many others. Ted Gup, one of the essayists from our first collection, said of This I Believe, "If you take all the essays in the aggregate, what you have is a sort of national anthem. That’s the beauty of it: You have a multiplicity of voices and it’s a celebration of that multiplicity."

This I Believe is a snapshot of the convictions of our age. The project has spread around the globe and the response has been overwhelming. Nearly 50,000 people (that’s the count at this writing; you can find them at www .thisibelieve.org) have submitted essays. Our database has been analyzed by researchers James Pennebaker and Cynthia Chung at the University of Texas using their so- called Meaning Extraction Method, which scanned the more than seventeen million words in the essays, finding that writers used seventy- one thousand different words. Among those, they analyzed the five hundred most commonly used— excluding pronouns, articles, and prepositions—focusing on nouns and verbs. They looked for combinations and thematic links and concluded, for instance, that older people wrote more of religion, America, and the nature of existence, while younger people often wrote of financial issues, sports, and music. People in the thirty- to- fifty age bracket tended to write more about relationships. Males were more likely to reference science and sports; females, illness and marriage.

But This I Believe is more concerned with the individual than the aggregate. As Edward R. Murrow said in his introduction to the 1950s radio series, "In a way, our project has been an invasion of privacy, like demanding a man to let a stranger read his mail." Our team sits down every day to open these emphatically nontrivial missives, and we feel a great responsibility when we review them. My colleague Viki Merrick, with whom I edited most of these essays, said she feels like she should wash her hands before sitting down to work.

We have admiration for those who have stood up to state their innermost thoughts. In an age of irony, an earnest statement is a target. In the newsroom environment through which these essays pass, the prevailing atmosphere is appropriately skeptical and even harsh. At its worst, it can be cynical and mocking. What advantage comes to people, particularly prominent ones, in making themselves vulnerable by speaking from the heart, standing without defense before an audience of millions? It is precisely this vulnerability that convinced us to prohibit interactive Internet com menting and discussion boards for this series. Certainly, each essay could provide great fodder, but we’re not interested in the offhand dismissal or low ante insult, particularly those generated anonymously. We are interested in creating a commons, where the same contribution is expected from all: not a critique of others but a statement of one’s own.

This I Believe found a natural home on public radio, because public radio was created to be a commons, a place where citizens could convene to speak and listen in the common interest. What else justifies its existence? Delivering news and music has value, but our mission calls for something more. My own work in public broadcasting over the past thirty years has centered on the encouragement of citizen involvement and finding new ways to turn listeners into participants. This I Believe follows in that tradition.

The primary tool of radio is the voice. Often on news programs, the voice is used in a simple declarative way, summarizing events, giving you the level of information that programmers think you need. But the human voice has more power than that. When it is used to express personal experience, it can find its way past your defenses and sneak inside to inhabit you and even find its way to your heart. Perhaps this could be interpreted as a pitch for the audio-book of This I Believe, in which each of these essays is read by its writer. So be it. It is a treat to hear these stories, read in the voices of those who wrote them. Most were unaccustomed to reading their own words aloud, certainly not for an enormous distant audience. One of the pleasures for me in this project is working with the readers to get them to move backward through the page to the thoughts that inspired their words. In the voice we hear the mind behind it. The invisibility of the speaker suspends our prejudice for a moment and we can be ambushed by ideas, perhaps from those we would write off if we could see them. We don’t judge by age or politics or race or face. We simply listen.

A cabdriver once said to me, while talk radio was on in the background, "Do you hear that? They’re just trying to make us angry, to polarize us. No one is listening." He was right. The program was playing directly to our prejudices and our fears. Among media decision- makers, "thoughtfulness" is not the go- to programming choice for increasing audience size. Our mode tends more to cockfight than discourse. In 1951, Edward R. Murrow wrote:

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all—now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog—there is an enveloping cloud of fear....

It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he has no real idea how long a lease he has on the future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts.

To those in post- millennial America... sound familiar? We, too, are divided by fear—fear of the other, and even of our neighbor. And our media thrive by feeding it. Fifty years after Murrow wrote those words, we remain haunted by the same dilemmas, trapped between hope and fear. Our team chose to revive This I Believe precisely to counter the divisiveness, the anger, the prejudice, and to raise a flag for thoug