Good stories are universal.
I wrote this column while paused halfway through the season two premiere of “Downton Abbey,” a BBC drama to which I should have no legitimate connection.
The series explores the extravagant aristocratic lives of the Earl of Grantham, his American socialite wife and their three daughters. Their titular home holds more servants than lords and ladies. These servants literally devote their lives to the noble Crawley family, waking every morning to help the Earl put on his morning coat and to make the ladies’ beds.
Compare this to Showtime’s “Shameless,” an American adaptation of another British drama. Single dad Frank Gallagher swindles money from everyone he meets to fuel his alcoholism. Meanwhile, his eldest daughter is left to fend for her five siblings while trying to live the life of a normal 21-year-old in a south side Chicago neighborhood.
These shows are at the extreme ends of the socio-economic spectrum—the Crawleys living what the protesters in Zuccotti Park would call the life of the 1 percent, and the Gallaghers occupying the lowest of the low point of the pie chart.
Like most people, I have never lived the life of an early-1900s British aristocrat. Far from it, in fact. The first eight years of my life were spent in a dingy mobile home park in a slushy corner on the outskirts of Niagara Falls, N.Y. My family never had much money, but we were never as poor as the Gallaghers.
I will probably never experience the luxury of the Crawley family and, god willing, hope to never live the pennilessness of the Gallaghers, but somehow, almost inexplicably, I feel extremely connected to both of them. I couldn’t tell you if I should be thanking the writers, the actors or the hundreds of other people involved in these celluloid dreams, but it is somehow easy to connect to people who never do a spit of work or who lie and cheat their ways through life.
I remember when I first read Ishmael Beah’s memoir, “A Long Way Gone.” I was a particularly idealistic person back then, with a “Save Darfur” sticker on my car and a Peace Corps dream in my heart. I hated the people in the world who hurt other people, and as I read about how Beah killed innocents with an AK-47 as a drugged-up teenager in Sierra Leone, I hated him too.
But then I read about his capture. His awakening. His redemption. Suddenly, I didn’t hate him anymore. Pity came first. Then respect. By the time I met Beah at a signing later that year, he had taught me more about humanity in 240 pages than I had learned in 20 years of life.
Good stories, like Beah’s, the Crawleys’ and the Gallaghers’, pull us into the lives of people who we might never otherwise meet, get us inside the minds of people outside of our tiny circles. They make the world less black and white and a lot more grey. They help to eliminate the divisive politics that have hogtied much of our world.
We need good stories.
Email: rlaforme@mail.usf.edu
