Not I!
That New Horizons very own Executive Director, that be ME, would have found herself, like countless others, embroiled in a #MeToo controversy!
And, then, lo and behold, not many months later, New Horizons Board Member, Steve, became entangled in one too!
Of course, now we know that #MeToo controversies have reached epidemic proportions.
Few can escape!
However, allow me to come back, later, to Steve and myself, now becoming New Horizons’ #MeToo Poster People, by taking a look back at how we’ve moved from where we were last year at this time to where we are now.
There we were, innocently, at New Horizons, around this time last year, trying our best to find a way through the chaos Donald Trump and Company had brought into our lives, getting himself elected to the highest office in the land.
For months we tried, again and again, to find new directions.
What could we do that would align with our objectives of being agents of change to help keep our country, safe, secure and unified, within reason?
Nothing seemed to resonate with who we are and what we could contribute.
Yet, in ourselves and all around us, in our families, with friends, in our neighborhoods and local communities, throughout our nation, we saw relationships being torn apart.
At New Horizons we were about building small “zones of peace.” We’d been doing this for decades. So we asked ourselves, “How can we help our local communities, and even our nation, regain its footing?
We were frightened, almost despairing. Still we believed that there must be something productive we could do.
Surely with all our many years of working to analyze and reverse the dynamics of
polarization in groups and organization, there must be some way we could assist.
Intent as we are, always, on building “zones of peace,” we were struggling, as were many, to find a viable pathway, post the 2016 presidential election, to a greater unity in our country and less divisiveness, for most of 2017. Still we believed there must be some way to improve things as they were.
Then StoryCorps came to mind!
On that breathtaking day of the solar eclipse, August 21, rising up from the debris in and around us, the idea of New Horizons partnering with StoryCorps rose up like a beacon.
“Aha,” we exclaimed!
“We can turn to storytelling, as a vehicle!”
“That would, for sure, be in keeping with our overarching mission!”
We knew we could do this! We had been using storytelling as a community bridge-building exercise countless times in the past.
Now we could do it again! This time we would place storytelling on center stage, not only as a part of a larger program event.
From that day forward, New Horizons began to develop an updated template for building small “zones of peace.” We would enhance one of the most impactful parts of our Coffee House Conversations approach, storytelling, offering it as a means for overcoming the polarization infecting our communities, near and far, post-Election 2016.
With this in mind, New Horizons Board Member, Steve, and I set out to introduce a new series of online storytelling-centered radio shows on Anastasia The Storyteller Radio, focusing on this single aspect, storytelling, as we might derive its usefulness from our Coffee House Conversations model that we had been successfully cultivating for the past decade or so.
We were excited to embark on this new direction, setting off on what we thought would be a new “zones of peace-building” track.
Listen to Steve and I, a month after coming up with our StoryCorps-partnering plan, unsuspecting of what would lay ahead, as we launch that online storytelling series program on podcast from September 24, 2017 here. Listen carefully and hear our energetic, yet naively, unsuspecting enthusiasm that was soon to show itself to be short-lived.
Unfortunately, our storytelling series plan, barely landed, as a tiny pebble in a huge pond, hardly making a ripple as it soon sunk into the depths. Nonetheless, over time, listener statistics for that podcast would show us that we were on the right track with our plan. Maybe even a head of time for how storytelling might, effectively, be utilized as a healing vehicle for overcoming social polarization.
However, little did we realize, on that day of our introducing our planned for storytelling series, that a torrent of societal chaos was brewing!
Just as Steve and I were unsuspectingly moving ourselves into our second broadcast for our new series, themed as interactive storytelling, both the “New York Times” and “The New Yorker Magazine” were in the process of toppling our lives and our radio show agenda, irretrievably turning the best of our intentions, upside down.
Interactive storytelling, the weaving together of storytelling with story listening, would have little place, at least for the moment, in this new world order up ahead!
The new name of the game would be almost exclusively about women’s stories, specifically about sexual abuse and harassment and power domination by men.
Interactive storytelling as an agenda and a program theme would quickly become a major misnomer!
Oh my! Oh my!
Life in these United States was not about to be put back together again into well-oiled working parts, that might help keep our country, so recently torn apart, even more than previously, grow and flourish.
No sirree! Our country was not on its way to a greater unity.
Not at all!
The largest possible area of division: that between men and women, had been buried – and would now be excavated in order that it might see the light of day and, hopefully, at last, a long overdue liberation.
This is what would be going on, almost simultaneously, with our well-intended radio show broadcasts and their idealistic agenda.
Unity among U.S. citizens, as a goal, was about to be usurped while the fifty percent or so of half the population, the female half, began to take its first steps forward into a new freedom, a liberation so monumental that its impetus would soon move around the globe!
Personally, what was about to happen, once that the sordid tales of Harvey Weinstein’s corruption, with more of the same throughout Hollywood and beyond, were about to usher in a new era of feminine respect and dignity in our work and private lives in a fashion that would never again allow civilized women and men to return to the status quo that had been.
In the midst of these happenings, New Horizons would introduce its Beyond Gender Tyranny Initiative. And both Steve and Anastasia would address the impact of #MeToo in their personal lives.
For a taste of Steve’s #MeToo story, some of our more recent podcasts, especially this one titled , Can A Man Truly Be Innocent, If Charged With Assault, can introduce you to what he has been entangled in.
And, this collection labeled Beyond Gender Tyranny on Anastasia The Storyteller will introduce you to some of Anastasia’s #MeToo adventures.
We’ll be back with more articles on stories, as we at New Horizons, offer you our best tools and talents to help you Move Beyond Gender Tyranny, if you are so inclined.
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