Mind if I tell you a story?
About three years ago I landed an assignment with a regional Florida magazine. The ME (Managing Editor) was new and she had a problem. The owner of the magazine had sobered up enough to actually remember an article idea that a golfing buddy of his was sure that the magazine had to cover. So the owner stomped into the fledgling ME’s office, told her to get a story done on “strawberry schools”, and then wandered back off to the golf course.
She passed it off to me. She had no idea what “strawberry schools” were. Neither did I, but that’s why magazines hire writers: to go figure it out and explain it to others. It took about three weeks of research with the USF history department and driving around rural east Hillsborough County before I was able to figure out what the heck a strawberry school was. The term referred to prewar rural primary schools in Florida, whose annual schedules was timed to coincide with the strawberry harvest. These schools for farming kids generally offered a lower standard of education than metropolitan schools until the state standardized the Florida school system in 1947.
The basic story was easy to get. A few phone calls and a web search got me that. Harder to get was the real story – not just the academic version, the dry tale of Floridian school modernization, but an actual story of real people in real conflict who actually cared about the battle fought over the strawberry schools. After three weeks I hadn’t found anything like that, and so I’d begun to despair of having any chance of writing a decent piece.
Finally in desperation I took a day, hopped in my little Toyota Camry (that didn’t have A/C) and drove down to the little town of Turkey Creek, Florida. Most of the strawberry schools were long gone; only a small few made the difficult transition to the modern school era. Turkey Creek Elementary was one of them. It was a long shot and I knew it, but it was all I had, so I packed a tripod, digital camera and tape recorder and went hunting.
As it turns out, I got lucky that day. The school secretary at Turkey Creek knew a local man who collected history of the area, particularly of the original Turkey Creek strawberry school. He was amazingly helpful with information, photos and interviews with surviving students and teachers. Best of all, the building itself was still intact; the schoolhouse, dating back to 1899, had been refurbished and restored and stood in a corner of the grounds of the modern Turkey Creek Elementary.
The doors had been closed and locked for years. Even though the building had been restored, the locals had been fighting with Hillsborough County (seated in Tampa) for funding to reopen it as a school library. They’d been fighting unsuccessfully for almost ten years. It was ironic; sixty years had passed, and it was all still the same rural/city conflict that I was writing about. It made for a good story – I told a brief history of the building and ended it on a short coda about the fight to reopen the building as a historic landmark. I submitted the piece, it ran in the next issue, I got paid, I moved on.
About a year later, I got a phone call from Sonny – the local historian who helped me so much with researching the piece – with some news. I hadn’t spoken with Sonny since I’d finished the article. Anyway, turned out that the building finally got funding, and that there were a lot of very happy people in Turkey Creek. Years of fighting the county had finally paid off and everyone involved in Turkey Creek were enjoying the victory. I congratulated Sonny and told him that I was happy to hear the great news. That’s when Sonny told me the rest.
Turns out that when the article ran, the locals liked it so much that they took another run at the county seat to get the funding. When the moment of decision came, someone dropped my article on a county commission conference table to make the point that their school was getting statewide media attention. Someone then read the article and next thing we knew, the library had its funding. Ten years of unsuccessful battling with the county finally hit a victory, thanks to something that I had written.
It was a revelation to me. And not a little bit scary. Up until that point I’d thought of myself as basically a guy who wrote things and then sold them; I’d never really considered any particular moral aspect to what I was doing, and it never occurred to me that I was actually impacting the world around me. That was a humbling experience, one that completely changed how I thought about writing. How I thought about morality and ethics in general. To realize that a relatively small effort can make such a large impact – positive or negative – on other people is to learn how to step softly and walk carefully. Because small steps can still leave big footprints.
Last few days, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Why people do what they do. The consequences of shortsighted intentions and selfish motives. Bigger pictures, larger roles, deeper truths and wider importances. And about the need to tread lightly but confidently – because while making a false step can bring pain, refusing to accept responsibility for your footsteps only condemns you to an existence of meaningless, clumsy blundering. And condemns everyone else in your midst as well.
It’s just a shame that some people don’t see that choosing not to decide is still a choice. Responsibility lands regardless.