Maybe
you’ve seen this poem by Donna Ashworth, which has gone viral during the
pandemic:
You’re not
imagining it, nobody seems to want to talk right now.
Messages are brief
and replies late.
Talk of catch ups
on zoom are perpetually put on hold.
Group chats are no
longer pinging all night long.
It’s not you.
It’s everyone.
We are spent.
We have nothing
left to say.
We are tired of
saying ‘I miss you’ and ‘I cant wait for this to end’.
So we mostly say
nothing, put our heads down and get through each day.
You’re not
imagining it.
This is a state of
being like no other we have ever known because we are all going through it
together but so very far apart.
Hang in there my
friend.
When the mood
strikes, send out all those messages and don’t feel you have to apologise for
being quiet.
This is hard.
No one is judging.
*
* *
I don’t know about
you, but that poem rings true for me.
The pandemic drones
drearily on, day after day, week after week, month after month. Some days it’s
hard to get up the motivation to do much of anything at all.
All too true, you
say. But what does that mean for communicators, and especially for those
involved in communicating about hard issues like international relief and
development or justice issues?
At a time when
everyone is stressed, the people you are trying to reach aren’t terribly
interested in having you add to their problems. They have enough problems of
their own, already.
That truth was
brought home to me recently in an interview with communications researcher and
campaign adviser Anat Shenker-Osorio in Slate magazine.
In the article,
titled The Theory That Explains How Senate Republicans Justify
Acquitting Trump, Shenker-Osorio was asked what advice
he would give progressives who are having such a hard time trying to get
Americans to pay attention to the importance of the impeachment decision.
Or, as the
interviewer Dahlia Lithwick put it, why are progressives “generally suck-ish”
at things like this?
“If
you look at progressive messaging, one hallmark of it across issues is that we
like to begin with some permutation of, ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you,’”
said Shenker-Osorio.
Shockingly,
he said, people already have “99 problems and they don’t want ours. They’re
generally not shopping for new things to worry about. They have plenty on their
plates, especially right now.”
That idea stopped
me in my tracks.
Intuitively, I know
it to be true. Especially now, during the pandemic, when many are just barely
getting by. I know I don’t need more problems, more bad news, more information
about things going wrong.
So why would I
think the people I am trying to communicate with need more problems, too?
What I want are solutions.
I want some good news. Tell me something that’s going right for a change.
Something that makes me feel a bit better about this sorry old world.
Don’t add to my
list of problems, in other words. I've got enough already, thank-you very much.
For
communicators—especially those involved in hard issues international relief and
development or justice, climate change, natural disasters and the environment—this
is a challenge.
We know only too
well about all the things going wrong in the world. How can we communicate
about those things without making people turn the page or leave the page?
People are looking
for hope. For themselves and for others. Fortunately, we are also in the hope
business, not just the problem business.
Maybe now is the
time to focus on hope, even just little bits of it. Especially now when, as the
poem says, we all are spent, just putting our heads down to get through each
day.
Donna Ashworth’s poem, Ladies, Pass It On, is from her book To The Women: Words To Live By. Photo by Getty Images via the BBC.
