Wrestling with Rhetoric

In my 20+ years of working for non profit organizations, there was little I dreaded more than fundraising season.

If given the choice between cage diving with great white sharks and asking people for money, I would very likely choose the sharks 10 times out of 10. There is very little that makes me more uncomfortable than asking people for their hard-earned dollars.

My dad is one of the best fundraisers I have ever met. I did not inherit this skill. When fundraising season came along, I remember bargaining with my boss: “Don’t make me do the ask. Let me write the stories that inspire people to give.”

And eventually, my wish was granted. In fact, as Communications Director for the organization, one of my primary responsibilities was soliciting and writing inspiring member stories: the woman who met her impossible weight loss goal, the troubled teen whose experience in one of our outreach programs inspired him to become an attorney, the elderly couple who met and married after joining the same exercise class…

I considered it a joy to meet with people, hear their stories, and capture them in a way that resonated with our donors. At one point, I was even tasked with writing our organizations story-writing guide. It was work I could do with pride.

Most of the time.

The last time I say Meredith, I had invited her into my office for a meeting to discuss possible volunteer opportunities. I ordered her a Starbucks white mocha, and we talked about our kids and our shared passions, looking for the best possible connect points for her skill sets and our needs as an organization. As I walked her back to the front at the conclusion of our meeting, she stopped mid-step and grabbed her side. “I’m not breathing all that well,” she told me. I waited for about 10 seconds before calling to a nearby co-worker to grab the oxygen tank. “Should I call 911?” I asked Meredith. She nodded that I should.

The paramedics arrived within 5 minutes, and the rest is a blur. I called to check in with her husband a few hours later, and he informed me that she had died of a massive heart attack. She was only 35. I was completely stunned. I remember walking in a daze back to my office where I found her white mocha, the last coffee she had ever consumed.

It was a horrible day at work. A year or so came and went, and I remember my boss saying, “Hey Kaeley, you remember Meredith, right? We sent her daughter to camp for free this past year. Can you reach out to her family and ask permission to write their story?”

Something about it felt so wrong to me, like it was deeply exploitive to enlist a newly motherless little girl as our new posterchild to solicit money from our members. What if she didn’t want her face on a poster? What if she didn’t want her personal tragedy used to make our CEO rich? It just felt so manipulative and wrong to me. Sure, it was great that we sent her to camp, and yeah, people should know that we used our funding to help people, but I just couldn’t seem to shake the discomfort I felt when I assessed this situation.

It’s hardly the only time I’ve wrestled with the implications of using communication skills in a way that felt manipulative. I mean, let’s be honest: At its root, that’s what most effective marketing is—skillful, targeted manipulation. Some people are paid millions of dollars to tell you exactly what you want to hear in a way that inspires you to spend your money, or cast your vote, or choose your favorite brand in alignment with their predetermined preferences.

It’s all a bit scary, really. I mean, now it’s even gotten so invasive that our phones are literally spying on us. My husband and I recently totaled our car, and, thanks to my recent Google searches about insurance payoffs and fuel efficient family vehicles, my social media feeds are newly cluttered with ads for family vehicles in our ballpark price range. But I digress. That’s not what I actually want to talk about.

I want to talk about the very thin line in communication between illuminating truth and puppeteering peoples’ emotions. Because it’s not always clear when one becomes the other, and I’ve been deeply troubled in recent days by my observations about the way certain powerful people use their skills in this department to exploit others for their own gain.

Watch, for example, how effectively the trans lobby (aka big pharma) appropriates civil rights language to champion their insidious cause. I mean, they’ve thoroughly convinced even ivy leaguers that it’s a human right for grown men to shower next to girls at the Y. How did this happen? What potent Kool-aid are they using? What human vulnerability did they exploit here in order for this to happen?

Or, on the opposite side of the coin, watch how Doug Wilson wedges his way into the void of the Christian boldness deficit to appoint himself as the solution and expand his rapidly increasing empire. So many are SO desperate and so hungry for leadership that’s not afraid to rock the boat that we ended up with guys like Donald Trump and Doug Wilson at the helm, and we’re suddenly convinced this is okay? That the ends justify the means? How did we get here?

In both of these cases, the leaders zeroed in on a really basic human need or trait and twisted it for their own gain and at the expense of a lot of other people.

I realize that my thoughts here are really skeletal, not thoroughly hashed out, or poignantly argued. This is because I’m still wrestling with them myself. I don’t have a lot of concrete conclusions yet except to say that I think we need to collectively figure out how to insulate ourselves from the kind of naivete or vulnerability that makes itself an easy target of these mass marketing campaigns. I’m trying to determine where to draw the lines—both for myself and others.

So what say you? What are the boundaries here? What does ethical rhetoric look like? How do we discern when we’ve encountered it vs when we’re being hoodwinked into agreement with someone else’s deviant campaign? Would love to hear what you all have to say on this one.