Why the bumper sticker?

by Eric Schechter.

Some people think that bumper stickers aren’t very effective, but I disagree. I urge you to buy several copies of TAP’s bumper sticker, for yourself, your family, and your friends. I’ll explain why.

A friend of mine is the editor of a 2-page employee newsletter at her place of work. When she heard of TAP’s slogan, “We’re all in this together,” she liked it, and so she added it to her newsletter; it’s now been in several issues. It appears inconspicuously in small print, in a box, about halfway down the leftmost column of the back page. It’s not related to her line of work — at least, not any more than it is related to my work or anyone else’s.

And the result? She has started hearing the phrase “we’re all in this together” popping up in employee conversations. Not in a big, conspicuous way, but simply as a part of their everyday thinking. We’ll never meet most of the people who see your bumper sticker, so we can’t be sure about its effect, but I’m guessing it must be similar to that of the newsletter.

The slogan “we’re all in this together” has been around for many years; everyone has heard it before. But we’re trying to reinforce that slogan, to strengthen its pathways in people’s brains, to make it a bigger part of people’s everyday unconscious awareness.

You might say this is a slightly elitist thing to do: We want to encourage other people to think like us. All right, call it elitist if you like, but I’m not ashamed of it. I may be a liberal, but I’m not a wishy-washy liberal — I am not a cultural relativist — I do not believe that all viewpoints and opinions are equally valid. I prefer the progressive future of “we’re all in this together” to the conservative present of “you’re on your own,” and I’m willing to work for it.

Repetition does work. That’s the idea of television advertisements and conservative propaganda, and they have the advantage of using lots of money to place their message widely. They need that advantage, to have any hope of getting the public to accept a message that is contrary to the public’s hearts and minds. We have the advantage of pushing a message that people like. Our car bumpers are free advertising space; let’s put them to good use.

TAP adopted the slogan “we’re all in this together” largely because of Paul Waldman’s May 2006 discussion of it. (He also gave a nice talk about it; see this video.) It’s not a specialized message, like “replace your incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones.” It’s a message of deep framing, perhaps the deepest of all, and it simultaneously confronts all our different problems — war, poverty, global warming, peak oil, pollution, degradation of the ecosystem, what have you.

At the root of all our politics is our view of human nature. The conservatives are such pessimists — they believe that humans are motivated only by fear and greed. We progressives, on the other hand, see that people want to be part of something bigger, that security is found in a caring community more than in a gated community. Our assumptions about human nature affect our politics, economics, and everything else. To heal the world, we must spread the spirit of cooperation, and hope that it spreads far beyond our own reach. That begins by making the language of cooperation a part of our everyday speech.

Please join our efforts.