Photo Credit — thedogg Breda, Netherlands / Tower of Babel — Bruegel (circa 1565)
Mouths are working furiously. Emotions are running high. Conviction is king. Everyone is right and absolutely certain of their superior reasoning. The validity of their position is plain for everyone to see.
And nothing is ever resolved. The tower will never rise.
The people in this part of the tower are determined to make things right according to their definition of right. Meanwhile, the people in another part of the tower are equally determined to stop those know-nothings before they destroy all civilized society. And at the same time, another section is exploring options to secede from the whole shouting match and start building their own tower far from this madness.
Were we always this contentious and deaf to each other?
It seems incredibly naive to remember that we once thought the internet, the World Wide Web, was going to bring us all together. Imagine, we would all be able to communicate with each other directly. The age of us and them was passing. Soon it was going to all be us.
Not so fast there, Einstein
Was this species ever ready to embrace all fellow bipeds? The myth is interesting but have we all ever spoken the same language? Have we ever heard exactly what each other was actually saying? I have my doubts. Even in those glorious long-past days of hunting and gathering, people would naturally be in conflict over this patch of particularly succulent green things or that freshly killed hunk o’meat. And the means of communicating any of that has always been rife with misunderstanding.
Remember, we’re merely very clever primates with opposable thumbs and just enough smarts to get us into serious trouble.
Allow me to clue you in just in case you haven’t been paying attention.
We’re in serious trouble.
And we’ve done it to ourselves. After all, the only predators left to give us a real run for our money are planetary climate systems and microbes. Check this out. They’ve teamed up and we are going to be toast. And while this has been unfolding what have we been busy doing?
Screaming at the top of our lungs at each other without taking one blessed moment to listen.
I had a math teacher once who attempted to teach algebra to our sad little class of art, theater, and writing majors. In short, the deer-in-the-headlights bunch when it came to numbers. That poor kid, he was a teaching assistant, would earnestly explain some concept about quadratic equations and we’d all sit there looking blank. So he’d repeat the concept word for word…but louder. He’d do this for hours and we’d still walk out of the class knowing nothing about whatever the concept of the day had been.
Multiply that by several million and here we are today.
The people strenuously trying to get some kind of action on the escalating global climate catastrophe think the people they’re shouting at are A) stupid, B) deaf, C) think it won’t affect them. It never occurs to them that what they’re saying and what their target audience hears are two entirely different things.
Earnest young climate activist Chrissie says: we can make a difference by changing our habits but we have to do it now.
Worn down homeowner, Marie, hears: you’re wrecking the environment and need to move into a high-rise apartment near a transit hub so you can get rid of that obscene gas-guzzling minivan.
Name your topic and in every circumstance, those speaking think they’re communicating one thing while those they’re directing this heartfelt stream of words at hear something entirely different. And the reaction nine times out of ten is defensiveness. Wearing masks during a global pandemic infringes on God-given freedoms. Limiting gun ownership is the first step towards losing control in case those goons in Washington get any bright ideas. Women wanting to abort unplanned pregnancies are clearly sluts who aren’t ready to accept responsibility for their actions.
And so on.
I’d love to weigh in here with my solution. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I wrote this piece detailing exactly how to solve the problem? I could say that I do this or I do that and voila!, all misunderstanding evaporates. We can join hands in our common interests and make this world an Eden (ok, let’s dial that last bit back some, hmmm?). How about a rousing chorus of Kumbaya?
I’m seldom guilty of aiming righteous proclamations at boneheads in other parts of the tower. My sins instead are more of apathy and omission. I sit here in my safe, blue bubble surrounded by people who — usually — hear exactly what it is I’m saying. You for example. Since you’re reading this on a platform of largely like-minded people I’m not treading gingerly in case I cause offense.
In our section of this new Tower of Babel, we comfort ourselves in knowing we’re in the right.
And the crew over there in another section feels the same way.
Shouldn’t I be making the effort to go over and find a word or two that we have in common with them? Kudos to the intrepid souls who are doing that. But I’m not that woman. Yet. I could change. So could they. Someone from their crew might be thinking that in the big picture we all want the same things. Some of us might even have an inkling that we’re not talking about a zero-sum game here. In fact, there could possibly be a growing certainty throughout the tower that someone’s jamming the signal and that we’ve all been speaking the same language all along.
I’m not holding my breath.
© Remington Write 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Incredibly well said. I just hope, for the sake of my son's generation, that we somehow manage to pull our heads out of our asses and get our shit together. Even if it's just barely in time, at least maybe we can salvage something of our democracy and our planet. Oh, and our decency.