Kenrick Cleveland asked: My transcriptionist lived in New Orleans until August 28, 2005, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit. She and her boyfriend and their four cats evacuated with two cars full of valuables and art and ‘irreplaceables’. They rode out the storm in Tennessee in a pet friendly hotel.
Eight weeks later they arrived in Portland after having gone back to New Orleans to pack up their belongings. For many months after they moved the reaction, when people would find out where they were from, was, ‘Wow, you’re a Katrina victim?’ Her response was always patient. ‘We weren’t really victims, like the people who couldn’t afford to leave, like the people who suffered in the aftermath. We had two cars, credit cards, cash and family support. We were inconvenienced, but hardly victims.’
On an even more positive note, she says, ‘This was a great move for me, a new life, new city, and I’m very happy for the change.’
Not everyone was as fortunate and this employee of mine has anger and sadness where the hurricane and subsequent nightmare of New Orleans is concerned, but she turned the upheaval into a fresh start.
We can use framing as a tool for positive change and a potent instrument for persuasion. When we think about Holocaust “victims”, we see “survivors”.
Framing is used every day by social workers who work with gang members, using reframing to show how murder is ugly no matter who the victim is.
The world of advertising relies entirely on framing. Appealing to different segments of the population, ad campaigns are tailored to youth markets, middle aged markets, senior markets, religious markets, etc. Advertisers take on the rebel and independent attitudes of youth culture to sell their products using edgy slogans and cool ads.
Politicians use framing, ’spin’, on issues all the time. Bush’s frame is that the war in Iraq is just. In nearly all of his speeches he suggests that ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us.’ And ‘It’s better to fight them over there, than to fight them over here.’ This is a presupposition. Who’s to say we’d have to fight ‘them’ at all?
The Democrats and an overwhelming percentage of U.S. citizens now have the frame that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism, but has everything to do with oil and no bid contracts.
Frames can show things in a positive light, ‘the silver lining’, so to speak. Segregation was framed as an evil injustice by Martin Luther King, Jr. convincing many people that it was wrong. Now several generations of Americans have grown up in integrated schools never knowing that kind of blatant inequality.
Use reframing to turn a hardship into a challenge, a setback into a time for reflection, a victim into a survivor. Frame it all!
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