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Dear Readers,

Welcome to The Wicked Truth website! I am thrilled that Doers Publishing has produced The Wicked Truth, which is my interpretation of the hit musical Wicked. Many of you have enjoyed the entertainment value of Wicked, but, if you are like me, you have noticed that there is something deep and profound about this musical. The Wicked Truth is my attempt to interpret the deeper meaning of Wicked for the larger world. How can we learn from Wicked to enact the themes of courage, devotion, the search for meaning, self-sacrifice, and love in our personal lives? These are a few of the themes I seek to explore. I invite you to join me on this adventure. If you have any comments or questions about The Wicked Truth, I would enjoy the opportunity to blog with you.

And always remember to mourn the wicked!

Peace,
Suzanne Ross

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Kill The Witch!

Submitted on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 09:44 AM by Suzanne Ross

When I was a child in New Jersey, we lived up a steep hill on a wooded street. Halloween nights were dark and spooky. I’d plow through deep troughs of leaves as I cut across the lawns to trick or treat at the next house, half expecting to see the headless horsemen galloping beneath the stark, empty branches. My insides prickled with excitement and fear because this was the one night of the year when ghosts and goblins haunted mortals. The crisp aura of evil filled the icy air, and I couldn’t have been happier.

My experience is not unique. Many of us enjoy the thrill of being scared to death on moonless Halloween nights or watching a horror movie. It’s fun to be scared when the threat isn’t real, of course. Knowing that ghosts aren’t real (as a child I wasn’t so sure!) or that “it’s just a movie” allows us to take pleasure in being frightened by something determined to do us harm. But there is more to it than pretending to be in danger in order to reassure ourselves that we are safe. When we imagine that evil exists in ghosts, goblins, and gory monsters, the reassurance we are seeking is not only that we are safe but that we are good.

At the opening of Wicked, Glinda sings to the celebrating crowd, “Isn’t it nice to know that good can conquer evil?” She is reassuring the citizens of Oz that they have indeed located and destroyed evil in the person of the Wicked Witch of the West. By defining the Witch as evil, the Ozians make themselves, by contrast, good, which is what we do each Halloween. But when we divide our imaginary world into good (us) and evil (those monsters), we prepare ourselves to do the same in real life

By the closing curtain of Wicked, we all know that the Wicked Witch wasn’t wicked at all. She was a lonely, misunderstood girl unloved by her father who dedicated her life to rescuing victims of violence. In celebrating her death, the Ozians are making a terrible mistake. It’s the same mistake we make when we believe that evil resides in others: we become like the Ozians, good people doing bad things. We mistake lonely girls for witches and do not see our own complicity in their suffering.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning novelist who was imprisoned in Stalin’s Soviet gulags (labor camps), had every reason to accuse others of evil while claiming the mantle of goodness for himself. But instead he wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

So perhaps we should take our Halloween thrills and chills as a warning to remember that witches, goblins, and ghouls are imaginary. As I argue in my book, evil surely exists but identifying it is never as easy as our fears make it seem. When we think that other human beings are more like demons than they are like us, we need to take off our good guy costumes and stop trying to force them to don an evil mask. If we can do that, we will no longer celebrate the death of a wicked witch. Instead, we will do what the Ozians could not do, mourn the wicked and face the truth about ourselves.

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When Good People Do Bad Things at Campaign Rallies

Submitted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 04:26 PM by Suzanne Ross

At the final presidential debate last night (Oct. 15, 2008), the candidates were asked about their attack ads and negative campaigning. One case came under particularly scrutiny: several instances of participants at McCain-Palin rallies shouting “terrorist” and “kill him” at the mention of Senator Obama’s name. Senator Obama criticized Senator McCain and Governor Palin for not condemning such behavior. Senator McCain’s defense was rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of good and evil. Here’s what he said according to a transcript on the Los Angeles Times website:

MCCAIN: Let me just say categorically I'm proud of the people that come to our rallies. Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you're going to have some fringe peoples. You know that. And I've -- and we've always said that that's not appropriate.

But to somehow say that group of young women who said "Military wives for McCain" are somehow saying anything derogatory about you, but anything -- and those veterans that wear those hats that say "World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq," I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they're great citizens.

Senator McCain wants to divide good from bad with an imaginary fence that encircles the participants at his rally: those on the inside of the fence, the majority, are good people and those on the outside of the fence, “some fringe peoples” are bad. Naturally, Senator McCain locates himself and his running mate safely inside the perimeter of the fence with the good people. Being inside the fence they are, by definition, incapable of doing anything bad. And those outside the fence are also, by definition, incapable of doing anything good. The world has been neatly divided into black and white.

As I have pointed out in my book, this is a very risky way to determine good and evil because what is good and what is evil changes depending upon who is building the fence. When McCain builds the fence, he and his patriotic supporters are inside (by definition good) and those shouting “kill him” are outside (by definition evil). Watch what happens when the “fringe peoples” apply the same theory of the fence: they encircle themselves within the holding pen of goodness and leave Senator Obama on the outside. When we give ourselves permission to use an imaginary fence to divide people into good and evil, good becomes anything that serves the interest of anyone on my side of the fence. Evil is anything that serves the interest of those other guys on the other side.

We do need a way to tell good from evil – that’s not the problem with the fence. Evil exists as does goodness and we are asking for trouble if we don’t know how to tell the difference. The problem is that the dividing line does not run between people, but right down the middle of each of us. Each of us is a mixture of good and bad deeds, error and sound judgment. To claim that the people who shout “kill him” are qualitatively different than other people, is to fall victim to the same double blindness that afflicts the shouters: they are unable to see the potential goodness in their target and they are blind to the faults that exist in each and every person’s soul.

Where is evil to be found? Evil exists when anyone – politician or voter, patriot or “fringe” dweller – sits smugly inside a fence of their own creation lobbing accusations of evil against outsiders, indifferent to the possibility that they may be making a terrible mistake. When good and evil are matters of black and white, the truly evil and the innocent victim are lumped together on the outside and the good people on the inside are at risk of doing something very bad indeed in the name of goodness.

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A Spark From Inside

Submitted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 05:27 PM by Suzanne Ross

I just got back from a visit to an art exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center called “Light From Inside: Art From Illinois Prisons”. All the artists are prisoners in the most restrictive prisons in the Illinois correctional system. They are mostly long-term prisoners and “lifers” who produced their art work with little or no support from the prisons. Many of them are in maximum security facilities with no educational programs, no job training, no access to correspondence courses and very limited art supplies. I have no idea what these men are incarcerated for. We were not given any information about their crime or whether they were claiming innocence. All we could see was their art and a brief statement from each of them about their art work. The show was organized by the John Howard Association of Illinois, an Illinois prison reform group.

The art was beautiful, creative, and moving, but their words were just as evocative. The artist of a graphic image mostly in dark reds and oranges with fragmented faces yelling in anger said he painted it around the time of his mother’s death. He said, “I was fractured, combating the effects of insomnia, desolation and the utter disbelief over how far I had fallen.” Another prisoner wrote, “I came to Chicago as a teenager. The big city has a lot of opportunity but I chose poorly, went in the wrong direction and committed a crime… A lot of us are willing to do the right thing. We’re not the same people we were 15 or 20 years ago.” Another artist who used pencil on paper to draw portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Jordan and Senator Barack Obama said: “Many of the battles I face today are because of choices of my past. I created this cycle of events, and in order to break the cycle now, I must change my karma so I can inspire my son in a positive way, the same way most of those inspirational men I drew inspired me.”

The exhibit was enormously successful in humanizing the prisoners. After viewing the exhibit, it’s nearly impossible to think of the prisoners as criminals and nothing else. Prisoners, especially those with life terms, are easy to objectify and dehumanize. As I viewed the art work, I wondered if our society may have crossed the line with these men and is using them as scapegoats. I talk about scapegoating in detail in my book, but briefly what that would mean is that their prison term is about more than just punishment. It is also about taking pride in ourselves as law abiding citizens in contrast to their delinquency. One prisoner wrote, “The stigma against us is that we don’t love this country. And that’s not true. Despite what’s going on, we’re still proud of our country.” Are these men more like us than we want to admit? Perhaps we lock them away in cruel circumstances to reassure ourselves that there are clear cut categories of good and bad people and that it’s easy to tell them apart.

I left the exhibit feeling uneasy about the fate of these forgotten men. They may be criminals, they may have made bad choices, so bad that they killed someone. But – and this is a very difficult question to raise because it feels scandalous to do so – but does that mean they have no good in them at all? And if there is some good in them, even a spark barely bright enough to light a dingy corner of their cell, what is that spark worth? And what happens to us as a society if we choose to say that spark has no value to us?

The John Howard Association offered this comment as an introduction to the exhibit: “The Board and the staff… understand that this show may generate powerful emotional reactions for some of the families of victims of these inmates. As fellow human beings, we share their grief. As prison reformers, however, our mission is to focus society’s attention on the need for prison reform. This show is meant to do that.” I want to thank the John Howard Association for courageously inviting us to engage in a soul searching conversation about the way we treat prisoners in the state of Illinois.

This quote from Dostoevsky appears in the exhibit catalog: “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.” Please let me know: If that indeed is how a society should be judged, what can we say about ours?

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Following Hilary’s Lead

Submitted on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 01:05 PM by Suzanne Ross

I watched Hilary’s speech at the Democratic Convention last night and thought she was fabulous. Strong, positive, articulate and compassionate, she made me proud to be a woman and a lifelong Democrat. The comments I heard from some of her disappointed followers, however, were far less inspiring. Insisting that Obama won the nomination because of continued bias against women, they declared that they would rather vote for McCain than for him. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps there is some resistance within the Democratic Party or among the general populace to the idea of a woman running the country. If so, my question is this: What is the best response of those who feel passionate about changing this attitude and who also feel that they have been victims of it?

I must confess that my partisanship as a woman and a member of a political party has weakened as I have gotten older. Grounding my identity in my opposition to another, whether it be a man or a Republican, or God forbid, both, proved to be very self-destructive. In The Wicked Truth, I discuss how I got caught in the trap of identifying myself as a victim of chauvinism and patriarchy, nursing my sense of injustice and resentment against all men, including my bewildered husband. I became dependent on my oppressors, demanding that they recognize me as their equal, before I could believe I was their equal. Hilary is not dependent on anyone for her sense of self worth, and I respect her for that. But her disgruntled followers are extraordinarily dependent on receiving affirmation from the very ones they believe are their oppressors. This dependence binds them to their oppressors, trapping them into always reacting, always angry, always resentful. Having experienced being victims, their entire discourse is one of accusation and blame, pointing the finger and listing their demands. If their goal is to change things for the better, we might ask if this a productive path to take.

No one ever changed another person’s attitude by accusing, blaming and putting them on the defensive. The only path to transformation that I know of is to have the courage to listen to the point of view you think must be silenced. By giving your opponent the very respect you want to receive from him, you create the possibility that he will listen to you in return. As Hilary said last night, this will not be easy, but change never is. Hilary is a listener. It’s what gives her the incredible ability to lead others to dream big dreams. She has the courage it takes to transform the world. I hope and believe that she can inspire the same courage in her followers.

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Being Interviewed on Streetwise

Submitted on Friday, August 22, 2008 06:09 PM by Suzanne Ross

This Monday I will be talking about my book on a local public access cable tv show, CAN TV21 hosted by Greg Pritchett of StreetWise. If you’re not from Chicago, you may not know about this organization. They are pretty amazing. They publish a newspaper called “StreetWise” which is only distributed on the street corners of Chicago by their licensed vendors who are all homeless. StreetWise gives them a job and some business training so they can become self-sufficient. They say that instead of offering handouts, they offer “a hand up”.

I became involved with StreetWise because they are helping us with our current promotional campaign for The Wicked Truth. We are taking ads in the Playbill at the Oriental Theater here in Chicago where Wicked is playing and distributing wrist bands in the theater district that say the “Wicked Witch Was Framed” with our web address on them. StreetWise vendors are doing the wrist band distribution for us. They were our first choice because they are very professional and respectful whether you buy their newspaper from them or not and they are already licensed to be doing what they’re doing. Greg wisely said that before he agreed to help us out, he wanted to be sure that the message of the book was positive. After he read it, he invited me to be on the show.

I’m looking forward to the chance to share the insights of the show with Greg and his audience. I’m really interested in what Greg thinks about scapegoating and where he sees it happening among the people he works with. In the show, the scapegoated Animals are losing their power of speech and their story is not being heard. The musical itself tells us the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, someone who was not recognized as a scapegoat in the 1939 movie. It wasn’t until we heard her story from her own lips that we realized she wasn’t wicked at all, just a misunderstood and lonely girl born with a birth defect, green skin. Greg and the people at StreetWise seem tuned in to the stories of people no one else wants to listen to. I kind of wish I was interviewing him.

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