By Ralph Lewin, President & CEO, California Council for the Humanities
This article was originally published in the Summer 2010 issue of the California Council for the Humanities newsletter.
To read Ralph Lewin's interview with Patrice O'Neill, Not In Our Town Executive Producer and CEO, please click here.
Stories open windows into the human soul. For however brief a time, stories help us understand what it’s like to be someone else—to live, love, and dream like someone else; in this way, stories help us understand ourselves.
The story that came out of Billings, Montana on December 2, 1993, while deeply disturbing, bolstered my faith in the human spirit. That cold evening, someone threw a cinder block at a menorah displayed in a bedroom window. Glass shattered across the bed of a five- year-old boy. In response, The Billings Gazette published a full page image of a menorah and asked residents “to display the menorah as a symbol of something else: our determination to live together in harmony, and our dedication to the principle of religious liberty embodied in the First Amendment.” Menorahs appeared in thousands of windows across the city.
That story became the subject of a Council-supported project, Not In Our Town. Closer to home, a similar story unfolds. In Temecula Valley, a group of protesters recently decried the building of a mosque because they fear the “terrorists” and their structure threaten the “Christian country” they believe America to be. Again, the response from local community members was swift and supporters quickly outnumbered the demonstrators. One person involved in the response said that the protesters were motivated by fear and ignorance. These represent the greatest threats to democracies the world over.
Fear and courage are part of the human experience. Of the two, fear is often easier to embrace. Fear acts upon us, while courage calls for us to step forward and embrace others, and to act. The humanities illuminate this difference, enable us to battle ignorance, help us imagine how to act with courage—
and remind us of the consequences if we don’t.