A Need for Listening

Brian McDonald believes in clarity. In an interview for Paper Wings, he wondered that those who choose to be obscure make this choice because they can't be clear. Where is the skill in being random? Where is the skill in being strange? This might be difficult for the sane, but it's more than a little pointless; it is far more impressive to be clear.

But in our national dialogue, clarity can be hard to find. People throw around charged terms with little care to what they might mean on the receiving end of the dialogue. I have no idea what someone might mean by "communism", "free market", "republican", or "socialism". And we could throw the definitions as defined by Webster and Merriam into this, but it wouldn't truly help. Those definitions are not always what a person means when they throw those words around.

Sometimes, a person might mean nothing. They don't know what they are talking about, it only becomes a beacon of anger. They are frustrated; they want someone to blame. They are arrogant; they want someone to look down on. They wish they were someone important; they rattle out their wisdom, for what it is worth.

A grand number of problems might evaporate if we could just achieve this clarity, but it is a hard task. For, along with clarity, one has to be enormously entertaining. Short-winded. Preferably yelling. How else can one hold attention? If I prattle on, as I am wont to do, I will lose my audience. If I start with my assumption, I can easily elicit that anger and cause people to adopt a stance of self-defence. I will anger my enemies, I will be blithe repetition to my allies. When the channel can be changed without even a first thought, nothing ever gets said. No one is listening.