It's time to focus - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Remember watching Schindler’s List? The World War II epic directed by Steven Spielberg? You may not recall every detail, but, what do you remember? You remember the girl in the red coat.

 

The film is shot in black and white, but, at one point, anyone who has seen the film will remember that a young girl - the actor was three years old when she appeared in the film - walks past in a vibrant red coat during the liquidation of a Polish ghetto. She is seen later in a scene in which dead Jewish bodies are being exhumed to be incinerated. Seeing her dead is a turning point for Oskar Schindler. 

 

Throughout the movie, many, many Jewish people are killed as the Holocaust plays out, but it’s the young girl in the coat who sticks with you. Her innocence and unfair fate is just one of millions of similar stories, but, as humans, we connect to other human stories. We can, understandably, get overwhelmed by scale and, in a way, desensitized to the heinous violence of war or tragedy. But, through one person’s story, the enormity of a tragedy can quickly snap into focus as you see that people are suffering, it’s not just numbers spouted by a news anchor or printed in the paper.

 

Remember about eight years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing war in both the Middle East and Ukraine? Remember the name, Alan Kurdi? He was a two-year-old Syrian boy who drowned off the shores of Turkey. Horrific pictures of his dead body, as he lay face-down on the beach, quickly made their way around the world at a time when people were complaining about Syrians fleeing their country, seeking refuge around the world. Then there was a toddler lying dead on the beach and a lot of people took a step back and reconsidered what was going on in the world and what was happening to people out there.

 

Many people had lost their lives, both back in Syria and on journeys to other countries, but it was a single picture of a single person that made many stop, think and understand.

 

I’m reading Disillusioned by Benjamin Herold. It’s a book about the failed experiment of the suburbs. It examines the extreme taxes, crumbling infrastructure, eroding services of smaller communities that cannot be funded by smaller and smaller tax bases. Sound familiar? In fact, there are a lot of similarities between the communities covered in this book and the struggles of rural Canadian communities such as Huron County, although a lot of Herold’s work focuses on race and gentrification.
And how does Herold tell us this story? He does it through the personal stories of five diverse American families. By telling us their hyper-specific, deeply personal experiences and following their lives, he tells us a much bigger story that has no chance of being nearly as impactful if it were all facts and figures.

 

We’ve now arrived at my monthly mention of Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’ book about the desegregation of Boston schools. In it, he tells the story of racism in Boston and, really, race relations in America, through the stories of a working-class Black family, a working-class Irish family and a middle-class Yankee family. It’s universal in its specificity.

 

In 1999, Lisa Belkin wrote Show Me A Hero, a book about the desegregation of public housing in Yonkers, New York that owes much of its structure to Common Ground, focusing on the few to tell the story of the many. 

 

Most of us will stare at pie charts and graphs and zone out, perhaps not understanding or not caring. But, when people’s stories are told, we take notice and can relate, from the mundane to the unbelievably tragic.