Shut Up and Listen! And That Means All of Us!

The other evening, a friend became cranky once the health care discussion began after dinner, so he turned to me for comfort and clarity about the issues in the newest national team sport of health care reform. Never having enjoyed professional soccer or football, he hadn't been privy to the culture of fans who fight to the death against the opposing team and have been known to kill disappointing players. He didn't get why constituents were so riled up. I apologized, I was less informed than I should be. I had read some accounts but had stayed in a cloud of dismay, distracted by the degree of outrage, fury and aggressive accusations over this one issue.

I felt like everyone was playing different music at the same time, with the resulting cacophony of blaring but discordant sounds signifying -- not nothing -- but instead that our patriotic insistence that our democracy is worth not only emulating but exporting was mistaken. Not only are marriages and families in trouble for lack of communication, but it is an epidemic. I had just returned from several weeks in Italy where yes, this was in the news, but the sounds didn't emanate from paper or from television.

I suppose the voices I was hearing became rather quickly overwhelming. The clamoring for attention or distraction or mob participation was becoming deafening. In what I refer to with tongue in cheek as an understandable condition of Psycho-Political Mood Disorder (not yet listed in the DSM, but no doubt soon will be), I began to withdraw from the fray and desist from even trying to learn about the issues.

Then a friend jolted my lethargy. Kimberly Krautter's recent column on the Huffington Post, entitled "Did the Inglorious N.O.P. Bust a Cap in Health Care Reform?," seemed to jump off the page, with a sassy Southern stream of consciousness in a diatribe of facts about health care reform and the disgraceful mob rule (that would be the GOP, not the Mafia). She was Barack Obama, not saying "Yes we can," rather "Yes we had better, and snap to it!"

My inspiration was to awaken from my own withdrawal, to break up the brawls, and issue a rather simple but loud and clear, "Shut up and listen!" We need some decorum here and our President Barack Obama and company need some pre-school teacher training to quiet down the audiences and to remind all of us that democracy requires citizen participation. And that freedom only exists with discipline, so quiet down, speak one at a time, and you shall not only be heard but listened to.

My psychotherapy experience reminds me that when anyone is screaming out resistance to change (and we all fear change), we need to attend to both content and meaning since change doesn't occur through conquest or by vote alone. Change needs a process so we who are in favor of health care reform have to be sensitive -- not in a manipulative way -- to resistances, and see if we can bend and compromise or better explain what may be confusing.

However, as isn't uncommon in my experience, I was missing the "one true thing," which came out over dinner last night. A group of four liberal human beings, including myself, were discussing this very issue of health care reform. And guess what, even we couldn't do it. We couldn't listen and respect each other. Unfortunately, we have deteriorated into interrupting each other, hurt feelings cutting the conversation short.

And so I return to my own difficulty and that of other liberals in really listening, to one another. We, who want to be the better people, pay way too little attention to setting limits, to shutting up and really listening with respect and to practice what we preach.

The suggestion of a mandate for change in the way we proceed and process is not popular within the liberal enclaves. They are fairly segregated with each "cause" standing on its own. So the emails come, about Darfur, about abuses towards women, about accountability for military and psychologist-inspired torture, and of course about polar bears. I am not the President, and so I don't really need to apologize to any one group. This is not to say polar bears are unimportant, okay?

However, if we destroy the human potential for communication and collaboration, we will destroy the whole planet.

Ecology isn't solely a quaint word about going green. It means all things and people are connected. In the present case it translates to the warning that if we don't create a climate of communication, of listening and translation, there will be no health care reform, much less climate repair. Even if health insurance is voted in, it can be voted out. The GOP is waiting to swoop and Sarah Palin might be picking out her new clothes for the job. We who are liberals had better get our act together.

And part of why it's never easy being green (as Kermit The Frog once sang to us) is because to work at any of these problems, we have to start with ourselves, with what might be our own private demons that provoke our ire and righteousness, and so we have a tendency to react by drowning out other opinions and feelings.

So here goes my revised message: Shut up and listen, all of us. Before we listen to others, let us look in our own mirrors, and reflect not merely on appearance or fantasies of being more pure than any other human being. And may we strive for honesty about our own capacity for honesty, first with ourselves.

Yes, the GOP is mighty and can be big and bad and mean and manipulative. But we, the tenderhearted are losing our senses and our sensibility. If we watch Rome, or America rather, burn with hatred, we are simply not doing our best to account for our own sins of omission.

Comments

[sort84]

I read the article and thought that it was nice...then I read the comments and it really did get me to think about progress and viable change. This is not the time to sit by and quietly dissolve, it is the time for action and if screaming is the only way to get attention, then every Progressive out there needs to start writing to your Congressmen. The author is right in saying that change isn't easy, but there is power in numbers and telling everyone you know about how important changing health care laws to be. Get your family involved, get your neighbors involved and don't stop spreading the message or writing letters until the message sinks in. Be loud!

[fuel4thefire]

talking to right-leaning people who embrace the oligarchy (banking ,insurance, oil and transportation industries) is not producing results as they have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are -- milking the American worker for massive profits; you are making the assumption that these groups give a hoot about the welfare of their fellow man; social narcissism is rampant in America and the rules of engagement are non-existent; as you know, all unhealthy narcissists are in a constant state of competition so they dominate their space ( and everyone in that space); you are right-on when you say the planet may be destroyed -- Al Gore has said the greatest threat is social narcissism; i have started a book series on Scribd called "It Has A Name"; i have not gotten to the social narcissism chapters yet, but there is plenty to write about and i am very, very concerned that we are on a one way street to...... fill in the blank;

[ReedYoung]

I agree strongly that the childish brutes disrupting town halls are doing the bidding of the oligarchy, but I do not agree that "the rules of engagement are non-existent." It only feels that way because "the rules of engagement" -- laws, actually -- which protect our rights to speak, assemble, and petition our government free from intimidation and threat were unenforced and violated, by those sworn to uphold them, for eight years.

http://www.reedyoung.org/politics/blessings_of_liberty/2009/08/19/

[lori572]

i will never understand why the gun toters were not arrested for intimidation?

[GrahamInCanada]

"I return to my own difficulty and that of other liberals in really listening, to one another. We, who want to be the better people, pay way too little attention to setting limits, to shutting up and really listening with respect and to practice what we preach."

In the first sentence, Ms. Smaldino correctly used "I". In the second sentence, she incorrectly used "we". I am not part of her "we", I disagree with her entirely, yet I am liberal.

"We need some decorum here and our President Barack Obama and company need some pre-school teacher training to quiet down the audiences ... quiet down, speak one at a time, and you shall not only be heard but listened to."

Ms. Smaldino may want politicians to infantilize power structures and impose an arbitrary order like a pre-school teacher acting in loco parentis, but I would oppose and never vote for such a politician to represent me in democracy, requiring that my representative address me as an equal, and not as a child.

Ms. Smaldino is wrong to believe that imposing an infantile sense of order onto democracy is a precondition for progress, but all of history proves her wrong. Democracy is messy and consists of ritualized confrontation, and works because of this, it does not fail because of this.

But I agree with Ms. Smaldino that she should shut up and listen, since the alternative in this post seems to be that she projects and fantasizes instead.

[TheAnthropophagist]

I agree entirely. The "bleeding heart" style of liberalism is sick and dying. We need only look at the healthcare reform "debate" to see that rational discourse is only tenable with those who believe in the power of the rational. As much as we would all love to work things out with a learned discussion about real issuse, that is clearly not how it works and this is not the fault of liberals. The MSM, infused with corporate dollars from their overlords, and conservative America have teamed up to create a cacophany of misinformation - one that cannot be penetrated by well-reasoned arguments. They don't want to talk. Why should we listen? America demanded a change when it threw off its Republican shackles after suffering through Bush. It's time for progressives (key word - liberal says nothing)to take a page from the enemy's playbook and actually wield the power given to us by the electorate.

[PlanetKansas]

Good points all, and I couldn't agree more with

"...if we destroy the human potential for communication and collaboration, we will destroy the whole planet."

Your profession is based on individual therapy but there are only a few proven approaches that work for mass therapy.

Just like reasoned individuals can find themselves joining a mob, so too humanity is easily led into wars, genocides and civil unrest. The mob always wins over individual rationality, and unfortunately, politicians know fear works much better than reason.

If we don't find a way, then our oceans will continue to die, the climate will warm, and human population will outstrip food and water. The earth will continue on, and life will surely evolve to fill the niches we humans left behind.

True, our last chance is to communicate and learn to work together, but I fear it would take a cosmic event to wake us up. The Christians think it will be Jesus, the Shiites think it will be the second Iman, and everyone else, a combination of Aquarius, UFOs and religion.

I myself wish the answers to our own evolution could be so easy, (a visit from enlightened aliens would be great!,,,but not likely).

I think the solution lies in our own evolution, and if we cannot find a way, nature will provide the balance for us.

I fear for the future of mankind, which is near the end of its run.

[GrahamInCanada]

And thank you for illustrating that the philosophy and reasoning expressed by Ms. Smaldino in this article does not lead to progress, it leads to despair.

You should not allow a classic liberal guilt complex to fuel your ego to the point of projecting internal neurosis onto others, leading to a desire to infantilize power structures so that they resemble kindergartens and to forcibly impose an arbitrary sense of order to relieve the stress of the liberal guilt complex.

Why not? Because the effort, doomed to failure, in turn leads to despondency, which leads to the irrational thought that nothing can be done and no progress can be made because the doomed effort to impose an arbitrary sense of order is mistakenly elevated to a precondition for progress when no such precondition actually exists.

Despondency causes a turn away from effort to fantasies of rescue, such as wishing for a sudden universal change in human nature or an intervention from outside.

One thing is certain, if we turn away from effort in despondency, it is unlikely we will ever experience success.

[TheAnthropophagist]

"The Christians think it will be Jesus, the Shiites think it will be the second Iman, and everyone else, a combination of Aquarius, UFOs and religion."

Yeah, because each and every one of us is sheep. Not everyone is foolish enough to buy religion, spirituality, or barely founded conspiracy theories. Atheists are people too. Just rational ones.

[PlanetKansas]

Ummm, I think I'm agreeing with both Graham and Anthro, just different paths to the same conclusion,

Reason and dialogue may work with individual discourse (if discoursing with someone reasonable!), but fail when arguing with primitive lizard brain of the collective masses. Obama would do better adopting some of the Republican strategies because the American public just isn't that sophisticated.

Can the polemics perfected by Goering, Lee Atwater and Carl Rove be harnessed for the public good?

[fuel4thefire]

baa-baa-bad of you to group EVERYONE into the herd mentality; there are plenty of people who are independent minded -- and many of those are foolish too, but many are critical thinkers; the problem is we are stuck in a way of life that is entrenched and will be very hard to change for the better;

[ReedYoung]

Heh-heh! I agree with what you said, but I don't generally bother saying it to mystics of any variant. Do you bash hornets' nests for fun? :D

But maybe I should bring it up more often. Believers tend to view their own superstitions as the "normal" ones, even the "chosen" and it's really not a great leap of faith, once one has discarded logic as the primary means of classifying truth and falsehood, from belief without evidence or reason, to coercion without justification, especially in order to impose a belief about a fictitious single supreme truth. The latter (coercion) actually follows directly from the former (belief based only on faith). So it's correct and moral to undermine religious belief whenever such is asserted as a positive force for morality.

[fuel4thefire]

i agree and placed a comment along the same lines; i recently said to someone i would move if there was somewhere to move to..... we got trouble right here in river city;

[FearlessFreep]

Does "Shut up and listen" apply to leaders too?