Communication

No one listens. No one hears. No one wants to hear any but the message that they agree with, and then everyone points the finger at the other guy as the reason why we’re a divided nation.

Recently, John McCain caused a minor stir in the liberal blogs with a statement that has been widely, and in my opinion, incorrectly, categorized as “it doesn’t matter when we bring the troops home from Iraq”. Keith Olbermann, whom I generally respect, did one of his “Special Comments” on the topic, beginning by “providing the context” for the Senator’s statement to correct accusations that the statement was taken out of said context, but even when putting it in context, Olbermann loses a subtlety of meaning that turns a reasonable, if possibly incorrect, statement into an absurdity that can’t help but anger those who hear it.

The full context:

Matt Lauer: A lot of people now say the surge is working.

McCain: Anyone who knows the facts on the ground say [SIC] that.

Lauer: If it’s working, Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?

McCain: No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq.


To me, it seems far more likely that McCain was trying to say that what isn’t too important is that he doesn’t know when the troops will be coming home. That’s significantly different than that it’s not too important when those troops will come home.

Now, I may disagree with the Senator as to what the best method of keeping American soldiers safe might be, and I may not agree that it is even possible to make Iraq a safe and welcoming place for our troops to be, so that having troops there for as long as we’ve had them in Japan, Germany and South Korea is no more hazardous a posting than at an American military base. And those are worthy debates to have.

But if you believe, as Senator McCain clearly believes, that it is possible to transform Iraq into this safe haven, this beacon of stable freedom in an otherwise unstable region, then he’s right, it really doesn’t matter whether he knows the specific date that he’ll have the troops home, it matters a lot more that we get cracking on making the troops who do remain there safer.

But I’ve wandered around the Internet discussing this, mentioning that if we can’t be bothered to try to understand what an opponent is actually saying and what he actually means before we take issue with it, can we really claim the moral high ground when the neoconservatives hear “we hate America” or “we don’t support the troops” when we give voice to our very reasonable concerns about the state of our nation?

And yet I can’t find anyone out there who doesn’t immediately begin responding to me as though I were some kind of Republican flak, trolling around spreading pro-Administration talking points.

We really can’t have an honest debate in this country, because instead of listening to what the other guy says, most of us seem inclined to extrapolate what we think we’ve heard to an entire position that either makes the person a friend or a foe… and then we respond in kind.

And just to make my point personal, I’ll bet that the reactions of most people on reading this entry will fall into two distinct camps (at least, those who haven’t read enough of my other stuff to understand where I really fall):

Democrats and other progressives are even now shaking their heads and dismissing me as a right-wing hawk, bent on defending an unending stay in Iraq.

Those on the right side of the political spectrum will probably come away from this saying “Yeah, he’s right, those damn liberals never listen to what we say, and they wonder why there’s such a communication gap in this country.”

It almost makes me wonder why I bother. I’m not kidding when I say that my conservative acquaintances seem largely convinced that I’m the worst of tree-hugging, granola eating, free-love hippy liberals while those I know of a more liberal bent seem sure that I’m a closet Republican, secretly longing for another 4 or 8 years of Bush policies.

And that, dear friends, is why we have a communication gap in this country. When someone taking a middle-ground position can no longer be heard as a voice of reason or compromise, but must be heard by both sides as an extreme partisan one for the other, then BOTH sides have cotton in their ears and their minds stuck in “idle.”

Please, please, PLEASE engage the gears of your minds. THINK. CONSIDER. It is not “flip flopping” to be open to new and different information, and to be willing to change your position as your understanding of the facts grows.

Liam.