That said I used to do a lot of work with poor people in Philadelphia. A big part of that work was h

That said

I used to do a lot of work with poor people in Philadelphia. A big part of that work was helping them prepare to tell their stories to people with authority. It was advocacy. My work was trying to get folks screwed by the system to talk about ways they had been screwed so that maybe the system would treat them differently. Or at least cut that person a break.

Even if they had a good story to tell, it was often hard to get them to tell the story in a way that anyone could follow. First you’d try to get them to tell it to you just in chronological order. They often could not do that. Saying one thing would make them think of another thing. They would jump around. It often wouldn’t really make any sense.

This was a problem, because if they couldn't succinctly make it make sense to me — who was on their side and wanted them to win — it for sure wouldn’t make sense to someone with power that was skeptical and liked the status quo.