Jay Allison - This I Believe II

MORE PERSONAL PHILOSOPHIES
OF REMARKABLE
MEN AND WOMEN

EDITED BY

Jay Allison AND Dan Gediman
WITH John Gregory AND Viki Merrick

ADDITIONAL EDITING BY

Emily Botein

Mary Jo Gediman

Ellen Silva

and the editorial staff of NPR News

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

www.henryholt.com

Henry Holt and are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and

Company, LLC.

Copyright 2008 by This I Believe, Inc.

All rights reserved.

This I Believe is a registered trademark of This I Believe, Inc.

NPR, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and their logos are registered and unregistered service marks of National Public Radio, Inc.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This I believe II : more personal philosophies of remarkable men and women / edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick; additional editing by Emily Botein... [et al.].1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-8050-8768-0

ISBN-10: 0-8050-8768-0

1. Belief and doubt. 2. Conduct of life. 3. Life. 4. Celebrities.

I. Allison, Jay. II. Gediman, Dan. III. Title: This I Believe 2.

BD215.T49 2008

170.44dc22 2008010110

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2008

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Margot Trevor Wheelock, who was responsible
for This I Believe

This I Believe II

DANGLING AT THE END OF EACH ESSAY in this book is an implied question: What would you say?

What would you say in five hundred words to capture a core principle that guides your life? Can you name a belief that underlies your actions? In the discovered truths of your experience, what abides?

This question is more important than what one thinks of a given essay. There are seventy-five of them here, after all. As readers, each of us is bound to take issue with some or be stirred by others. And your reactions wont be the ones of the person sitting next to you; one mans clich is another mans revelation. Often, I find that an essay may not strike me one day, but will carry meaning months later when my own circumstances have changed.

As editors, we have aimed to be as inclusive as possible in our selection, choosing statements from teenagers to those in their nineties, and from a wide range of profession, background, and experience all over this country. Youll find writing from the famous and the unknown. Many essays arrived over the transom; some we solicited directly.

There are statements here from Nobel Prize winners, high school students, a diner waitress, an Iraq War veteran, a nun, an astronaut, a professional skateboarder, well-known artists, writers, and scientists, a drug addict, a dental technician, a former Guantnamo interrogator, and many others. Ted Gup, one of the essayists from our first collection, said of This I Believe, If you take all the essays in the aggregate, what you have is a sort of national anthem. Thats the beauty of it: You have a multiplicity of voices and its a celebration of that multiplicity.

This I Believe is a snapshot of the convictions of our age. The project has spread around the globe and the response has been overwhelming. Nearly 50,000 people (thats the count at this writing; you can find them at www.thisibelieve.org ) have submitted essays. Our database has been analyzed by researchers James Pennebaker and Cynthia Chung at the University of Texas using their so-called Meaning Extraction Method, which scanned the more than seventeen million words in the essays, finding that writers used seventy-one thousand different words. Among those, they analyzed the five hundred most commonly usedexcluding pronouns, articles, and prepositionsfocusing on nouns and verbs. They looked for combinations and thematic links and concluded, for instance, that older people wrote more of religion, America, and the nature of existence, while younger people often wrote of financial issues, sports, and music. People in the thirty-to-fifty age bracket tended to write more about relationships. Males were more likely to reference science and sports; females, illness and marriage.

But This I Believe is more concerned with the individual than the aggregate. As Edward R. Murrow said in his introduction to the 1950s radio series, In a way, our project has been an invasion of privacy, like demanding a man to let a stranger read his mail. Our team sits down every day to open these emphatically nontrivial missives, and we feel a great responsibility when we review them. My colleague Viki Merrick, with whom I edited most of these essays, said she feels like she should wash her hands before sitting down to work.

We have admiration for those who have stood up to state their innermost thoughts. In an age of irony, an earnest statement is a target. In the newsroom environment through which these essays pass, the prevailing atmosphere is appropriately skeptical and even harsh. At its worst, it can be cynical and mocking. What advantage comes to people, particularly prominent ones, in making themselves vulnerable by speaking from the heart, standing without defense before an audience of millions? It is precisely this vulnerability that convinced us to prohibit interactive Internet commenting and discussion boards for this series. Certainly, each essay could provide great fodder, but were not interested in the offhand dismissal or low ante insult, particularly those generated anonymously. We are interested in creating a commons, where the same contribution is expected from all: not a critique of others but a statement of ones own.

This I Believe found a natural home on public radio, because public radio was created to be a commons, a place where citizens could convene to speak and listen in the common interest. What else justifies its existence? Delivering news and music has value, but our mission calls for something more. My own work in public broadcasting over the past thirty years has centered on the encouragement of citizen involvement and finding new ways to turn listeners into participants. This I Believe follows in that tradition.

The primary tool of radio is the voice. Often on news programs, the voice is used in a simple declarative way, summarizing events, giving you the level of information that programmers think you need. But the human voice has more power than that. When it is used to express personal experience, it can find its way past your defenses and sneak inside to inhabit you and even find its way to your heart. Perhaps this could be interpreted as a pitch for the audio-book of This I Believe