A favorite saying in the South famously goes, “Get out of the kitchen if you can’t take the heat.”
For my great-grandmother, who for decades prepared from scratch three hulking meals daily for about a dozen farmhands with all the modern conveniences a 1930s/40s kitchen would allow, it indeed got hot from the relentless burn of a wood-fired stove. Way hot. Especially in the Middle Tennessee August growing season with no AC or ceiling fans.
Whoever wanted to bend my Grandmother Butler’s ear with a complaint, a request or any other idle chit-chat that could waste her valuable time generally had to venture to the kitchen to do it, and hence her love of that old expression.
Fast-forward six or seven decades: the kitchens of the modern world are much cooler and calmer places these days, but the heat still burns in a more figurative application of the phrase, in the forum of public dialogue.
The kitchen (of sorts) is still there: our interconnectedness through media of vastly diversifying forms provides a place where all kinds of news-reporting and idea-sharing are cooked up – though some not even half-baked, I might add –and served to a global population.
Thermal heat has been replaced with the heat of emotionally charged opinion, often hitting fever-pitches that stoke feelings of anger and hate between entire populations of people.
The lines between genuine fact-focused news reporting and unapologetically opinionated editorial are blurred beyond much hope of their sponsoring media organizations ever getting a grip on reality.
The heat is on alright, and often times – I must admit – I can’t take it. The thumb hits the “off” button, and I’m back to calmer places, back to sanity.
It’s a real downer. This isn’t the way it has to be. With all the potential that media offer today to educate, enlighten and inspire, what most consistently rises to the top are the most shrill, most misguided and most purposefully destructive voices, viewpoints and personalities.
A retired Knoxville, Tennessee educator, Sandra D. Cannon, wrote an insightful op-ed piece in The Knoxville News Sentinel this past weekend, describing in an exceptionally well-balanced way her disappointment in how public debate has evolved, from the formats of traditional media to the likes of Limbaugh and Maher. Read it.
As a substitute teacher now, Ms. Cannon sees the vitriol in today’s classrooms daily, not only in students arguing among one another but also in arguing with her.
The outcomes can be seen every day. Neither many students nor the grown-ups who should know better seem to care about learning or embracing the tools of a thoughtful, productive and well-measured point/counterpoint exchange – one that doesn’t quickly decline into mudslinging of the worst Jerry-Springer kind.
Amid the muck, the public relations profession represents two faces: first, as part of the machine that’s positioning and protecting the voices that are most contributing to the madness; but then secondly, as a professional discipline that offers an abundance of methodologies, creativity and know-how to make education, enlightenment and inspiration surrounding critical issues a reality.
Toward that second point, the power of organizations like the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and its tens of thousands of individual members offer a great deal of talent and expertise. While a wholesale shift in the status quo probably can’t happen, many folks would agree: the quality of debate in this country has fewer places to go but up.
They say that a kitchen make-over always contributes back the most value to a home.
Across the spectrum of public discourse, the public relations profession should turn up a different kind of heat in the kitchen – one generated by a full-on makeover that helps brings out better communication for better outcomes – and in the process, increases the value of the media home we all inhabit.
