The clouds look heavy today. After weeks of sunshine, it's refreshing to see the billows of thick grey drift across the sky. I wish I were up there, flying through them on my way to somewhere nice.
But rather than fly through them, our lot is to live under them at the moment. And they look like they might yet rain on us.
I'm finding it hard to be happy this week. I'm not going to pretend that I am; I'd much rather be real. And yes, as I said the other day, it might be down to the news; it might be the awful times we live in, and the hopelessness they bring. But I don't think so. Not really.
I watched a TV news interview today (repeated on YouTube). It was a masterclass in not-listening. The interviewer, armed with an agenda of 'simple' questions would not let the the guest speak. Meanwhile the guest, armed with an agenda of bullet points to stick to, would not stop speaking. Each kept interrupting each other in a sort of escalating war of propaganda, squeezed into a certain amount of minutes. It was like an obstacle course - only absolutely exhausting to watch. But you know this. This is every day now, on every station, and it's everywhere.
What happens is that we go away with an impression of the answer, or the obfuscation of the answer, that informs our narrative about that person and the viewpoint they represent.
So-and-so got angry very quickly; what's he got to hide? Why was she so desperate to change the subject? What is the answer to that simple question? Why can't they just say sorry?
It's depressing. You know what Right-Wing-Joe is going to say before he begins, and you already know what Left-Leaning-Lionel is about. They'll defend their team, even when their team is in the wrong and they know it, because that's their team and you don't ever change your team, even if your team captain happens to have shot the spectators, or was caught on tape swearing like a sailor.
If you ask me (and to be fair, nobody is) it's the teams that aren't helping us here. It paints the narrative that you must take sides, protect your side (and in lots of cases their livelihoods), and attack, attack, attack everyone from the other perspective.
I don't know if there's a word for that - where large groups of people start attacking their enemies and defending their own, based on a disparity of strong, ideological entrenchments?
Wouldn't it be better if we learned how to listen? "Quick to listen," says James, "slow to speak, slow to anger."
But the guest wouldn't stop talking, and the interviewer wouldn't stop interrupting. There wasn't time to let it fizzle out; you can't have those selah moments of dead air to let the audience make up their own mind in a fast-paced news broadcast. There are no full stops on telly any more - just interrupted sentences - hang-on-a-second, let-me-jump-in-there, with-all-due-respect-minister - hyphenated interpositions that don't seem to do much good. And all of it paints the narrative for us that the world is divided.
Well it doesn't have to be; not if we take the time to stop talking and listen - I mean really listen. Otherwise, what are we doing? We're just perpetuating the same old stuff over and over again. And anyone who's lived through this week knows that we really shouldn't be doing that.
No rain as yet then, from those dark, heavy clouds. I guess it will come eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment