At this week's DFA meetup here in Oakland, we did another framing exercise similar to the one we did at our ast Meetup (where we were fortunate to have George Lakoff himself speak), and again at
Democracy Rising II. Around a hundred of us gathered in a room, and after a brief talk on how to re-frame, we broke up into small teams of 2-5 each and tackled Social Security.
The approach we used was simple:
- Identify which progressive values underlie our support for Social Security.
- Brainstorm statements, phrases, and metaphors that link Social Security with those values.
- Refine and select the best statement and present it to the group.
The entire exercise took just 20 minutes. It's quick, empowering, and easy to do. You could add this to the agenda of your own local progressive activist meeting quite easily.
In my group, we identified the following values at the core of our support for Social Security:
- Responsibility
- Trust
- Prosperity
- Protection
- Community
Using those values, we brainstormed a number of statements that evoked those values in the context of Social Security. One of my group members told us that he was at a community meeting recently, and an 85-year-old man stood up and said:
"I sit in the shade of trees I did not plant."
We felt that statement really captured the values of service, responsibility and community. I recommend it not just for Social Security, but for any discussion where you want to evoke those values.
We chose one statement as our best, and then reported it to the larger group at the end of the exercise. Each other team presented their best line as well. Here are some of the results, subject to the vagaries of my admittedly shaky note-taking skills (if you were present and your notes differ, feel free to correct me in a comment):
Values | Statements |
Trust, Responsibility | Social Security is a promise to our parents and our children, and we will keep it. |
Strength, Community | The strength of America comes from shared responsibility. |
Community, Cooperation, Safety, Protection | The ideal of Social Security is for our society to cooperate as a community to provide security and protection for one another. |
Responsibility, Trust, Safety | Social Security is insurance. Investments can rise and fall; Social Security is a promise to our elders we can trust. |
Prosperity, Community | Social Security allows all of us to share in America's prosperity. |
Safety | Let's put the "security" back in Social Security! |
Fairness | Privatization: the broker's Social Security Act. |
Safety, Prosperity | Americans are proud of our Social Security program that provides real financial security -- unlike the failed privatization schemes in England, Chile and Sweden. |
Responsibility, Trust, Service | It's the responsibility of government to protect Social Security rather than dismantle Social Security. |
Responsibility | Privatizing Social Security is irresponsible. |
Cooperation, Opportunity | The strength of Social Security is that it is shared opportunity. |
Responsibility, Safety | It is our responsibility to support and promote the safety net of Social Security for all Americans. |
Cooperation, Community | Social Security is about uniting generations in the fight for a strong community. |
Safety, Trust | Don't gamble with the rent money. |
Strength, Trust | Social Security is the strength of the original contract with America. |
Not bad for a crowd of amateurs, I'd say.
The value of the exercise lies not only in the possibility of producing a "killer frame" that we can use to win this fight. One of the most important gains we made at the meeting was in our own mental abilites. We exercised our minds.
As I've said before, when you exercise, the weight doesn't change; you get stronger. By practicing this process of starting from values and building messages based on those values, we developed our ability to think on our feet, to create frames effectively, and to evoke powerful values in our conversations about issues.
Facts don't win elections. Values do.
The better we get at tapping into the shared progressive values in the minds of all Americans, the better we will do at the ballot box.
At the end of the evening, we circulated clipboards and wrote our statements down. They will be collected and delivered to George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute.
Also at this meeting, we got reports from folks who had been elected to the two Assembly District committees in our area, and wrote thank-you letters to Barbara Boxer (for her stands on Ohio and Rice) and Art Torres (for his help with the DNC chair campaign).
That's what I love about DFA meetings. We actually do stuff. We also have our freewheeling conversations, as all progressive groups do (hey, community is one of our core values, dammit). It's that blend of talk and action that makes DFA the model, in my mind, for how progressive groups should operate. Here's hoping Dean brings that to the whole Democratic Party as DNC chair.
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Special quote-wonkery addendum: It's been pointed out to me that the tree-planting quote has been around in one form or another and was not originated by that fellow at the community meeting. I did a little research, and the closest I could find to an original attribution is this:
"The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit." - Nelson Henderson (don't ask me who he was, because I have no idea), circa 1860 according to some sources.
The quote still rocks, whatever its provenance.