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The Clean and Green Club, December 2020

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2020

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When Is It OK to Distort the Truth?

I was deeply shocked to watch the actor playing committed pacifist Dave Dellinger, who was an actual friend of mine, punch someone out in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Dave served some serious jail time for refusing to fight in WWII, and all of his writings emphasize nonviolence. Quite relieved to read Harvey Wasserman (who was involved in the Chicago events) say in his review of the movie that it never happened, was disgracing Dave’s legacy, and should be removed from the film:

Here Sorkin’s film hits a bad bottom. Played by John Carroll Lynch, we sense a suburbanite whose spiritual roots in a lifetime of pacifism are not quite clear.

In one truly inexcusable moment, Dave is shown punching a court officer (and then apologizing for it).

THIS ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN!!!

Dave Dellinger spent years in prison for refusing to take up arms during World War II. He was an elder beacon for countless nonviolent protests.

He titled his autobiography From Yale to Jail. Even when sorely provoked — at least in his adulthood — it was a point of honor that Dave Dellinger would refrain from physical violence.

Years later, as we sat in at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, Dave made a pretty convincing case that Abbie had been murdered. When election protection attorney Bob Fitrakis held hearings on how Ohio’s 2004 election had been stolen, Dellinger came to Columbus while conducting a long water-only fast.

It was also Dave — not Tom — who read the names of those killed in Vietnam. He did it at the beginning of the trial, not the end. The litany included Vietnamese names, not just American ones.

Like Tom (and unlike the actor who portrays him) Dave’s powerful physical presence reflected his heartfelt commitments. There are artistic liberties that work in this film, but that alleged moment of personal violence does not. Mr. Sorkin, please edit it out!

Dave once wrote me a letter describing not wanting to do violence by smoking a cigar when people found it offensive. So I believe Harvey. And I don’t understand why Sorkin would undermine everything Dave believed in for a cheap visual. People will watch this movie and think, well, he wasn’t so committed to nonviolence after all. It is a total invalidation of what he stood for and the way he lived his life.

Harvey’s critique is all the more valid because Harvey himself has a tendency to write in a somewhat apocalyptic style, with a lot of capitalizations and exclamation points and predictions of dire consequences or major victories (see an example in the single-line third paragraph I quoted). Yet this false characterization of Dellinger was unacceptable because it completely changed the meaning of Dave’s philosophy and behavior.

Bending or distorting or outright ignoring the facts is something that happens way too often in Hollywood movies. I still remember a movie portrayal of nuclear safety whistleblower Karen Silkwood, whose death on a highway has been widely linked to a deliberate attack. While official investigators said she’d fallen asleep, a union investigator found that her car was indeed rammed from the back. That the documents she was bringing to meet with a New York Times reporter were never found makes the story of deliberate murder far more likely.

But in the movie (it may have been “Silkwood” or it may have been “The China Syndrome”), her little Honda is repeatedly hit from behind by a large pickup truck—but she survives.

I honestly don’t see how changing the outcome was at all useful in telling the story. It essentially lets the company she worked for get away, literally, with murder.

Yet, when I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time and dozens of other books), she made a distinction between truth and fact. The emotional impact of powerful fiction doesn’t have to be based in fact, she says—and we have many powerful novels to prove her right.

Facts are limited. It is a fact that we’re sitting here, but whether any truth comes out of this meeting is something else again. We don’t always know [truth]. I write stories because that’s how I look for truth. I was looking for truth when I was writing Wrinkle. We live in a world where it’s very difficult for people to understand that a story can be truthful and not factual.

For me, the line in the sand is whether shifting the facts to make a better narrative interferes with perceiving the truth. In both the movie examples I’ve cited, I think changing those particular facts is unacceptable because it changed everything about what we believe about Dave Dellinger and about the people who probably killed Karen Silkwood.

Where is the line YOU draw, and why?

This Interview Breaks New Ground on Reimagining the World

I’ve begun to focus some good thinking and research on how the pandemic creates opportunities to skip “going back to normal” and instead remake the world we really want to see. I’m even looking for a publisher for an article I’d like to write, called Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing.

As I began this research, podcast host Tony D’Urso invited me to return to his show–so I got my first chance to see how some of this sounds out loud. Keeping in mind that this is in the very early stages, and that we spent the first ten minutes sharing some background, I’d love to know your thoughts. You might even get a credit in my next book!

You can listen (and read the transcript) at https://tonydurso.com/crisis-opportunities-now-with-shel-horowitz/ –and Tony would be grateful if you gave a quick kudo at ratethispodcast.com/tony And here’s my list of takeaways from the call

Shel’s personal backstory as a writer, marketer, and activist (Timings: 00 through 8:20):

  • How activism got me into marketing and journalism in my teens
  • My start in journalism: a right-wing high school alternative newspaper gave 15-year-old left-wing me a platform–and ran my articles with disclaimers!
  • My first paid writing assignments, at $3 per hour–and my unusual motivation to write those articles quickly
  • The humble beginnings of the business I’ve run for more than 39 years
  • Why forming a successful group to block a large mountainside housing development proposal opened the door to the work I’ve done for the last 20 years, integrating profitability with environmental and social good

Shel’s motivation for activism on multiple issues, especially clean energy (8:20 through 10:33, 15:06-17:35):

  • Why clean energy has a much brighter future than even 20 years ago
  • How the energy-hogging Empire State Building was converted into one of the greenest buildings around–and how those improvements generated 33% return on investment
  • The cow-poop-powered green heating system in my antique farmhouse (built in 1743)

How we pivoted in 2020, and how we can make those pivots bigger and more long lasting to create a better world (17:40-24:38):

  • The opportunity COVID created to remake the world differently–including the newly global reach of formerly local events
  • How I got connected to a 16-year-old green entrepreneur on the other side of the country, which would never have happened pre-pandemic
  • Chances to explore entirely new careers, because your old career may not exist anymore
  • How we’ve often faced huge social shifts (the 1918 pandemic, when no one had Zoom and few people had a phone in their house; transition from horse to engine power; the vast disruption of the Internet) and risen to the challenge

What it means to be environmentally and socially responsible AND profitable (29:23-39:54):

  • Successful examples from clothing company Patagonia to a company that builds a ladder out of poverty using inexpensive solar LED lanterns
  • Cost savings in going green, including a different approach to manufacturing (and the technology we already have that will eventually make that possible at scale)–and how that could revolutionize medicine and other areas
  • How even a pizza shop could make a meaningful difference–with a youth training program that offers four distinct types of benefits around job and entrepreneurial skills, healthy eating, life skills, and more profit to the shop owner
  • How a house in the Colorado snowbelt went net-zero-energy–in 1984–and paid for all the improvements out of energy savings
  • How mindset changes possibility, including a magnificent quote from Muhammad Ali (I built my TEDx talk around this quote)–and how to frame the narrative to find out what actually is possible
  • What I’ve learned by posting a daily public gratitude journal

“Opportunities, ideas, are under every rock and tree” (44:34-48:00):

  • If you generate ten ideas a day), find two each month to explore
  • Our power is in our resilience and our inventiveness
  • The benefits of the conscious choice I made to have a happy life

Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World–and what my legacy might be (48:00-54:00):

  • How marketers benefit by finding an elastic market (like books)
  • Why Guerrillas should be quick and nimble
  • Marketing that leads to action–and action that makes the world better
  • The secret of turning customers into ambassadors
  • Why customer evangelism is one of the most profitable things a marketer can invest in–and how surprisingly easy it is to develop and harness that loyalty (easier for businesses with a higher purpose, by the way)

Tony’s summary of the call takeaways (54:00-57:12):

  • The necessity of getting good and getting fast
  • The power of a higher purpose: “sew good seeds and do good deeds”
  • When you see problems–brainstorming how things can work better–grab hold of your vision
  • Find ways you can pivot
  • Find 10 new ideas each day

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Dare to Matter

Dare to Matter by Jordan Kassalow and Jennifer Krause

Social entrepreneur and optometrist Jordan Kassalow gives us a book that’s part memoir, part guidance for social entrepreneurs, and part inspirational self-help pep-talk about living a meaningful life. Co-authored with his rabbi (who gets a full co-byline, not just a “with” or “as told to” credit), the book is exclusively in his voice.

Kassalow stumbled around for a while before he found his joy, but eventually chose to help people in deeply disadvantaged economies live and work better through providing eyeglasses. In many cases, a simple non-prescription pair of drugstore readers could take someone from hopelessness to active citizenship and add years to their productive work life; for others, a common prescription could do the same. After working with various medical charities that took him to distant lands, he founded VisionSpring to make glasses more widely available.

While short on the specifics of how to start and operate a social entrepreneurship venture, the book is strong on the personal challenges one particular social entrepreneur faced, and how he overcame them. And even stronger on how to figure out where your skills, interests, and resources intersect, what your purpose is—and how to align your life and career with that purpose, and make your life matter by harnessing that purpose. Among the tools to guide that discovery are the instruction to find the need that specifically needs you, as opposed to some random other person—your skills, knowledge, joy, and feeling of aliveness when you do the work (pp. 113-114). Related to that, ask yourself these two questions (p. 228): “What needs me? What feeds me?” He also gives some good guidance on whether, in your unique situation, you should set up as a for-profit, nonprofit, social entrepreneur, or other model (p. 76), and how to balance your need to do good with your own financial health (p. 83).

And I love his injunction to “see compassion as a renewable resource,” nurtured by your own self-care (p. 108). He further admonishes,

Be hyper aware of any injustice you encounter that ignites a fire in your belly so intense that the only way you can extinguish it is to act. Challenge yourself to examine the issue from all angles—don’t stop at one giant problem. Tease the issue apart until you find the need within the need that you are uniquely suited to serve…the point of need where you can exert your energy that helps take down much bigger and more overwhelming problems. (p. 131)

Providing glasses to those in need enabled him to check off boxes for addressing poverty, inequality, and educational opportunity.

He notes that social entrepreneurship pioneer Bill Drayton calls finding that personal sweet spot “your jujitsu move.” This is particularly relevant to my own mission of using profitable business to address the world’s biggest social and environmental problems.

I also love the schooling he got in making sure every aspect of a social good enterprise respects the dignity of those you serve. One lesson was understanding why it was no help to provide someone with the perfect prescription if the frames were so hideous as to make the patient a laughingstock. Similar lessons are sprinkled throughout the book.

Peppered with quotes from people like Helen Keller, Rumi, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (one of my favorite spiritual teachers), and even my old friend Rev. Victoria Safford, who I’d lost touch with decades ago (and got inspired to track down and reconnect with), the book is an easy read. It’s fun to watch Kassalow try to integrate the very different parts of his life: practicing his craft as a partner in his father’s optometry practice where he serves mover-and-shaker clients in the 1%, his work on the ground in primitive conditions in remote parts of Latin America, Asia, or Africa, his love of backcountry camping, his journey as a Jew, his hobnobbing with other social entrepreneurs at conferences such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. There were a few times when I found him annoyingly out of touch with the realities that many of us face, a certain sense of privilege and arrogance. But on the whole, I enjoyed it.

One of the things I really like is that Kassalow sees joy and gratitude as integral in his work. I especially like the suggestion (borrowed from Heschel) to live your life in “radical amazement” (p. 256). I didn’t have that wonderful wording until reading this book, but I’ve been attempting to do that for many years, and fairly successful at it. My daily public Gratitude Journal on Facebook often celebrates the mundane with that sense of radical amazement—the joy I take in living a life so full of blessings. Later this month, I will post about whatever little miracles happen to me for the thousandth consecutive day.

Strongly recommended for people of any age who are figuring out how to align their career with their values. Order from your favorite independent bookstore at https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780806539034

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About Shel

 

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

 

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