Listen.

I take the words, “shut up” pretty hard.  These are words I have been told my whole life, they are words I’ve said my whole life, and they are absolutely offensive to me.  (Side note: my “name” in my Senior Memories book, given to me by the Yearbook class who made it, was “Shut up”. In my defense, this was because I would tell people to shut up in high school because they were interfering with my reading of books that had nothing to do with whatever subject was being taught at the time.).  It’s not offensive because it’s rude. It’s not offensive because we want the other person to provide silence. It’s offensive because we want people to shut up when we don’t want to listen.  

I have this driving need to be understood and to understand.  Half the time I feel like I’m speaking a different language than everyone around me and that they understand a few words of what I’m saying and then they take out of context how the words were fit together.  If I don’t feel understood, I get agitated, I get louder, I get defensive, and I get angry. These aren’t helpful to my goal. I’ve been called a lot of names, I’ve been blocked, I’ve been told to get off my soapbox.  Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s funny, and rarely do people just say, “I understand”. I think this is why listening is so important to me. Because I know what it’s like to not be heard. I know what it’s like for people to roll their eyes, sigh heavily, and ignore what you say.

 

One of the greatest things that I ever learned in college was active listening.  It’s taught in case management classes and hostage negotiation classes. Active listening is the art of showing that a speaker is heard.  It’s paraphrasing, summarizing, and in essence, it’s empathy. Empathy is a word that gets thrown around a lot without much thought into utilizing it.  Empathy requires listening to all sides of a debate, it is required to understand where someone is coming from on an issue you don’t agree with at all and you don’t care what the other side says.  Empathy is lacking in partisan politics at the moment because we are so bent on name calling and being right.

I am me.  I am a small town girl who grew up surrounded by Christian Conservative Republicans (some of the best people I know), who go to work, go to church on Sunday, cheer at their kids ball games, stand for the flag and are proud as can be of our nation’s military, and just want the freedom to continue living their lives as they have always lived them…and there really isn’t anything wrong with that.

I am also the friend of gays, minorities, liberals, Wiccans, Atheists, Agnostics, Socialists, and every space in between and they’re some of the best people I know.  All they want is freedom to live the way they see fit and there really isn’t anything wrong with that.

I am just me.  I’ve had my share of traumas in life and I’ve spoken about some but not others.  Here are things that I am not and the reason I listen to all sides:

 

I am not a young black male growing up in an inner city.

 

I am not a cop who deals with the sickness and evil in life on a daily basis.

 

I am not a gay woman trying to make her way through and being terrified that her Christian Conservative family will no longer love her or accept her if they know. 

 

I am not a woman from Central America who is surrounded by crime and death and who is looking at entering another country in order to protect her children.  

 

I am not a white man who has stood on the ground of the “sandbox” and put myself in between my ideals and a threat.

 

I am not a Muslim who was raised to believe that Americans hate me and that while my country is at war with America, I have to fear for an errant bomb to hit a school bus and kill my children.

 

No one is the same in life.  None of us have the same story, the same thoughts, or the same beliefs.  That doesn’t mean that we don’t have things in common. Love. Freedom. Wanting the best for our children.  The list can go on. We all think we know the right way. We all think that our beliefs and faith are the only way.  There are things we will never agree on at all. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to each other and allow each other freedom.

Active listening requires us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and to walk a little bit. It isn’t listening to refute or to try and find a flaw in their argument so you can win.  It means listening. It shows respect. Name calling is the exact opposite of listening. “Snowflake” “Nazi” “Libtard” “Repug”. Throwing these names around does nothing to help further your goal of attempting to get people to listen to the words you say and all it does is get people pissed off.  

Listening does not have to mean agreement.  I listen to a lot of things I don’t agree with and a lot of people with opinions I am not a fan of but I listen because I want to understand.  I listen because I want to know what they base their ideas on. Listening to someone will not hurt you.

This country, this magnificent country that was founded on freedom, that was founded on unalienable rights that are not given by the government but by the Almighty, has always been contentious.  How could it not be when it was founded on the basic right to disagree? The only difference that we are seeing now is that people no longer want to listen to the other side. We are so stuck in our echo chambers that anything we perceive to go along with a topic that we aren’t comfortable listening to we want it to stop.  Is this really new? Well, no. Think of all the people, that were told to shut up and how they said, “no” and went on to change the world. To paraphrase some lines from Hamilton, history has its eyes on us…and it’s up to us who tells our stories.