But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and
some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings
may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping
goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher
prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are
realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike
has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at
a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing
system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or
hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt
attack on production.
You have, therefore, the circumstances in all their sprawling
complexity, the overt act which signalizes them, the stereotyped
bulletin which publishes the signal, and the meaning that the reader
himself injects, after he has derived that meaning from the experience
which directly affects him. Now the reader's experience of a strike
may be very important indeed, but from the point of view of the
central trouble which caused the strike, it is eccentric. Yet this
eccentric meaning is automatically the most interesting. [Footnote:
_Cf_. Ch. XI, "The Enlisting of Interest."] To enter imaginatively
into the central issues is for the reader to step out of himself, and into
very different lives.
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