Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Easing Humanity’s Burden, One Small Battle at a Time

By Alec Arellano for the project team consisting of Alec, Mieszko Hajkowski, Anna Yamchuck, and Natalia Wrzesien

Few things worth doing are easy to do. As trite as this statement is, it nonetheless accurately captures our experience with HIA Poland 2011’s social campaign projects. The four of us – two Poles, a Ukrainian, and an American – come from different national, cultural, and social backgrounds, and brought our own unique perspectives to the task at hand. We encountered many challenges and setbacks during the creation process. In spite of this though, we persevered, and learned a lot through the experience.
Initially we were tasked with working on the dauntingly broad topic “Ethnic and National Minorities.” We considered several different approaches to this subject area, including focusing on racism towards people of African descent in Poland, attitudes towards Chechen refugees, and anti-Semitism. Mieszko, one of the Polish fellows in our group, told us that he regarded anti-Semitism as the most important issue concerning national and ethnic minorities in the Polish context. This, combined with the fact that Poland will host the European soccer championship in 2012, made us decide to focus our campaign on the issue of anti-Semitic language at football matches. Since only two of us were Poles, and none of us were football fans, we had to do some research before preparing our brief for Marek Dorobisz, Creative Director for the Warsaw-based advertising agency Ars Thanea and our advisor for the project. Our best resource for helping us better understand the scope of the problem was The Brown Book, an annual register of racist incidents and neo-fascist crimes published by a Polish NGO called Nigdy Więcej (Never Again) Association. From this organization, we learned that the use of anti-Semitic language and images as a way to disparage the opposing team happens often among fans at football matches. Other match attendees as well as stadium administrators frequently tolerate this behavior. Coming from a country in which public displays of anti-Semitism are not tolerated, I found this shocking. It was interesting to learn about the extent to which the Polish Christian majority’s relations with the Jewish minority are still problematic, several generations after the Holocaust. 

Preparing the document for Marek in which we outlined the message, audience, and execution of the campaign proved to be a challenging experience. We struggled first to come up with an adequately narrow definition of our target audience, and to find space for compromise between our different visions of the way the campaign should be conducted. For example, much debate took place regarding whether or not violent football hooligans should be targeted. We eventually decided this question in the negative. Our many disagreements in the course of crafting the brief highlight the extent to which compromise and negotiation are essential skills, even among people with a shared commitment to social justice. 

We also tended to become stuck on a particular aspect of the campaign and debate it endlessly without accomplishing anything. Our capacity to get lost in abstractions may have served us well as university students, but now the situation called for action, not rumination. This experience gave us all practice in balancing our intellectual and practical talents. Additionally, putting together the final version of our group’s brief forced us to make sure our language was focused and precise, and communicated an idea that was clear and workable. After we had finished our brief, though, Marek gave our creative process a twist by assigning us to design a campaign around a brief prepared by another group of fellows. In an instant, our campaign changed from one focused on anti-Semitism to one targeting wage inequalities between men and women in the workplace. This forced us to quickly come up with innovative approaches to a new and unfamiliar social problem. For some of us, this shift also meant learning to separate our capacity for creativity from any pre-existing passion that we might have had for an issue with which we had been previously been working. 

For me, and I suspect this is the case for others as well, the most important lesson that I took for the experience of crafting our social campaign was a reminder of the unavoidable difficulty and frustration that one faces when attempting to address human rights issues. The essayist Joan Didion once observed that many civic-minded Hollywood celebrities exemplified the particular sort of vanity that consisted in believing that social problems could be solved through the goodwill of exceptional individuals. I think that sometimes well-educated, compassionate young people can possess this sort of vanity as well. At one point, when we were discussing our briefs with Marek, another fellow commented that some of our campaigns seemed superficial, and did little to address the root of the human rights problem we were tackling. Marek smiled and said that he didn’t necessarily disagree, but reminded us that most people in Poland – and indeed, in the world – were at best indifferent to all the human rights issues that seemed so important to us. If we could make them devote just one second of their thoughts for the day to our issue, then that would be a victory. Often great struggles are won through a sustained perseverance in small battles. As current and future defenders of human rights, it is important to learn how to balance idealism with pragmatism, and learn to accept to sometimes glacial pace of social change.