The inaugural meeting of the Conference on Ethics and Public Argumentation will convene April 1 – 4 of 2014 at Butler University. The theme running through this first conference meeting is “engaging the community,” with the idea of community drawn from contexts ranging from local to a global levels. Over the next few weeks, this forum will discuss the presenters and programs that will highlight this first public event of CEPA.
The theme of engaging the community concerns ways of communicating intended to foster effective community building in an ethical fashion. Community refers to an identifiable group of people in ongoing cohesive, supportive, and positive interaction with one another. While the goal of building community sounds positive or ethical in itself, it’s possible to conceive of less positive or less ethical means of forging communal bonds. A strong sense of community can occasionally have an unfortunate “Us versus Them” feeling, which can fuel unhealthy competitiveness, intolerance, or even violence. Unethical demagogues often have traded on this sort of ingroup versus outgroup rhetoric, typically demonizing outgroups, in order to gain or hang on to power. It is unfortunately easy to call to mind examples—NAZI Germany, Rwanda, Sarajevo.
The sessions on Wednesday, April 2, will feature three award-winning documentary films exemplifying positive values in community-building communication. The film-makers will be present to discuss their documentaries. The screenings that day will feature, first, “Undefeated: The Roger Brown Story,” the work of journalist Ted Green; second, “Autism: The Musical,” followed by a presentation by Elaine Hall, the film’s director and founder of the Miracle Project; and third, “Medora,” directed by Andrew Cohn, which follows a struggling, small-town Indiana high school basketball team. In this and following entries of this Blog I will discuss their productions, beginning first with “Medora.” The next entries will concentrate on the films by Elaine Hall and Ted Green.
Medora, Indiana, is a town of about 650 people not far from Louisville, Kentucky, known for the longest covered bridge in the US (three spans over the White River). Like many small communities around the US, its population and its prospects are dwindling. The once proud Medora Hornets, the high school basketball team, have not won a game in years. Their losing record seems a match for the deteriorating economy of the town. Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart came to Medora to follow, in film, the lives and experiences of the young ball players during one season as they struggled to notch just one win. Their story seems the antithesis of the movie about a team from a similar small town in southern Indiana, since the movie “Hoosiers” was loosely based on the state championship season of the team from nearby Milan, Indiana. Milan won their championship 60 years ago this March, and much has changed for rural and small-town America, as well as Medora, since then.
Cohn and Rothbart document a developing reality for many rural small towns across the nation—poverty, drug and alcohol dependence, fractured and dysfunctional families. A conclusion from a US Department of Agriculture report describes the conditions of the Medoras around the country: “Concentrated poverty contributes to poor housing and health conditions, higher crime and school dropout rates, as well as employment dislocations. As a result, economic conditions in very poor areas can create limited opportunities for poor residents that become self-perpetuating.” The rates of rural poverty in the US tend to be higher and more persistent than those in urban areas (95% of counties exhibiting persistent rates of poverty are in rural areas). Although rural poverty is statistically more pronounced in other parts of the country, there is a swath of southern Indiana counties from around Cincinnati running west toward Evansville marked by entrenched poverty, including counties particularly hard hit since the recession. This region includes both Medora and Milan.
Early in the film, a local is asked how she would describe Medora today—her answer is simply the one word, “Closed.” This view contrasts with some footage from earlier days, the Medora of the fifties (the era of Milan’s championship portrayed in “Hoosiers”). There are scenes of busy downtown streets, thriving stores and businesses, and basketball gyms full of cheering, excited fans. Current scenes show the same sites, but now the streets are deserted, the store fronts are boarded up, fewer fans—mostly sitting resignedly—show up for the Hornets’ games. The earlier vibrancy is completely absent.
The film focuses on the everyday lives of three or four of the players as they deal with the problems characteristic of many parts of rural America. Their own disadvantages in life are representative of the disadvantages of their community. The center on the team, probably the best player, has been taken in by the family of one of his friends, while his mother is in a rehab program for alcoholism in Louisville. The obvious sacrifices of the friend’s mother in trying to care for this additional boy in her small home is particularly touching.
We ride along with another of the young players, a guard on the team, as he debates with himself whether to try to make contact with the father he has never known. The concern shown by the parents of his girlfriend as they share an evening meal him in their home also depicts the virtues that might counter the dreariness of Medora’s reality.
A younger boy on the team struggles with minor scrapes with the law and “acting out” in school and on the team. Other boys consider what will happen to them in the future. One meets with an Army recruiter in his home, while another contemplates a technical training program in Chicago. We also see the pressures on the young coach, in his first year on the job, who works the night shift as a policeman in nearby Bedford, Indiana. Interspersed in these threads of life are scenes from the basketball games themselves, as the Hornets lose game after game by 30, 40, or even 50 points. Will they ever win a game, and will they ever have a shot at winning in life?
As we follow these boys and their families in the film, we begin to wonder whether one win will provide the spark of hope they need. Will the love, support, and care of families and friends build a community struggling for a future? Or, is it really just a game?
William W. Neher
Bill Neher is professor emeritus of communication studies at Butler University, where he taught for 42 years. Over those years he has served as Dean of the University College, Director of the Honors Program, Head of the Department of Communication Studies, the Chair of the faculty governance, and most recently as the first Dean (Interim) for the new College of Communication begun in June 2010. He is the author of several books dealing with organizational and professional communication, ethics, and African studies, plus several public speaking and communication text books.
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