Excerpt from Move the Message

Move the Message: Your Guide to Making a Difference and Changing the World
Josephine Bellaccomo

Change is hard. We want to change injustice, so we think about how the world ought to be. We try sharing these ideas, hoping to connect to someone by appealing to his sense of fairness and civility. We add logic and common sense. If that fails to persuade, we up the ante, exposing the exploitation to put public pressure on the exploiters. Yet we find that those who have the power to apply pressure are already so overburdened by negative images that they can’t bear the burden of more bad news. So, we try losing the anger and sacrificing some detail to formulate a positive message and, when change doesn’t happen quickly, we contend that still nobody’s listening.

If getting people to buy into a vision of a better world were all it took to get people to welcome our information, shift their point of view and modify their behavior, changing the world would be easy.

But no change is so small that someone isn’t threatened by it. It’s not easy to get someone to see how the costs of better-for-some can be less than the benefits of better-for-most. Yet when we can agree on the same kind of world to move toward, we can start talking about what actions we can take to create that world. . . .

Hear Lantern Publisher Martin Rowe talk about this book! (mp3)