Listening is a lost art in America.
Nearly everything I know about the world was learned by listening. When I first worked as a community organizer I was assigned to work in an impoverished all black Fairgrounds Park neighborhood of North St. Louis in the Seventies,. I was a middle class white kid from suburbs barely out of my teens. I hadn’t even gone to college back then. What the hell did I know about impoverished black folks?
I found out that if I listened, really listened to what black folks were telling me about their lives and their problems then I did know something about black folks. I knew what they knew.
As scary and alien the streets and the housing projects of Fairgrounds Park can be for an idealistic white kid from suburbia, I listened and learned. I spent five year listening to concerns the people of Fairgrounds Park neighborhood. People who most respectable middle class white Americans regard as welfare loafers, gangsters and lazy no-accounts and saying goodbye them was the most painful and tearful experience of my life.
I swore to myself I wasn't going to break down sobbing the Fairgrounds Park farewell party on my behalf. I made it nearly to the end until the fine citizens of Fairground Park presented gift of a spare tire so I'd have a spare if I broke down on my long trip to relocate in Philly. I broke down sobbing at the generosity of their humble gift because a running 5 year joke between myself and the residents was I was the white guy with the beat up old Plymouth Valiant that was always getting flat tires in their neighborhood and didn't have the common sense to carry around a spare.
The lesson I learned by listening to the people of Fairgrounds Park were the most important political lessons I've ever learned.
I learned that listening was my most important tool in gaining a perspective on how poor people and cultural minorities experience the very real world they live in, even if their world is a completely different reality from mine. I will never experience class or racial discrimination myself, but by listening I can know the same things a poor person or a black person knows to be true about the neighborhood, the society and the world they live in.
I liked listening so much that later in life I became a professional listener, or at least that's what I think a psychotherapist does. Listening is a good thing. When my therapy clients have to explain things to me, it helps them understand their own needs better. But also listening to them helps me learn things about them and about myself.
For me, listening is a selfish experience because in order to improve yourself and develop as a human being you have to learn how to listen.
I was schooled as a clinical psychologist and got the best education as a psychotherapist that borrowed money could buy. I should have saved myself the time and the money. Being a good psychotherapist doesn't really require an advanced degree in clinical psychology, all it requires is a strict personal code of ethical behavior and training on how to listen, really listen to what a person is telling you about their own lives. Yes, becoming certified as a psychotherapist, a social worker or mental health counselor will get you monetary reimbursements from insurance plans. It doesn't make you a better psychotherapist. In my case it doesn't enrich me either, because 90% of my clients are poor people who can't afford insurance in the first place.
Here I stand well past my mid life crisis living the same kind of hand to mouth existence when I was a young community organizer in Fairgrounds Park with one exception, I own a small two bedroom bungalow where I maintain my office and my own home which in a blue collar racially mixed neighborhood that I purchased for $25,000 just before the real estate boom of the Eighties.
By all traditional measures of success I'm a failure, but I listened -really listened- to all of my parents and friends pleas to get beyond my idealistic phase and gain some measure of prestige in my profession. I listened, I failed and I became satisfied with the magnitude of my own magnificent failure. I often feel like bursting out of my front door and running down the street shouting about my lack of accomplishments to the top of my voice to the entire world, but I'm too busy listening.
The biggest problem confronting the Republican Party isn't corruption, the war in Iraq or incompetence. The biggest problem for the GOP is they don't listen to anybody.
The Republican Party pretends like they're listening but hear only the things they want to hear. Republicans don't listen to anyone outside of their own self contained feedback loop of information. They don't need to listen because they know all the answers.
For the GOP, debate is listening to the sound of your own echo. Why do Republicans get defensive every time they're told they are out of touch with reality? If Republicans would stop babbling their talking points long enough to really listen to what their critics are telling them, they wouldn't have so many "issues" with reality.
Since I’m a professional listener my own qualified diagnosis of the Republican Party is that most of their members are listening impaired Bill O' Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter and George W. Bush are intellectually handicapped because they never learned the art of listening. You can't learn anything if you never shut your mouth and listen to anyone else.
The Republican’s have failed to hear the voice of the American public on the Iraq war and nearly every other policy issue of the day. Republicans even take an arrogant pride in their poor listening skills by boasting that Republicans don’t pay any attention to public opinion polls or the media. When the GOP speaks, eyeballs start rolling and glazing over.
In that sense, Republicans have transformed us into a society of big talking fools who have convinced ourselves that we have nothing to learn from anyone else. Forget about listening, forget about debate, forget about manners, and forget about diplomacy, nobody can tell us anything that we don't already know about the world we live in.
The American code of conduct for political debate is "I have the opinions that you should definitely have, so I'll talk and you listen."
I learn a great deal from Republicans when they talk to me. What I learn from listening to Bill O' Reilly and George W. Bush is how to avoid coming off like a fool every time I open my mouth. And that's a dammed good lesson for anyone to learn.