The other night in chorus rehearsal, one of the altos turned to me and announced, “I specialize in animal noises.” She then proceeded to relate, with a great deal of pride, how she had recently succeeded in driving a rooster into a frenzy by clucking at it like a hen.
This struck me as rather strange. I mean, when it comes right down to it, I can quack, bleat, and bark with the best of them. It just has never occurred to me to consider this one of my signal accomplishments.
Sometimes I wonder about the things people find important in life. Some years ago, I had a next-door neighbor who was a house painter—a very good one, by all accounts. After work and on weekends, Bob would work in his yard or do repairs around his house. Every Fourth of July he would stick little flags and pinwheels in the grass and set up horseshoes to play with his nieces and nephews. Every Christmas he celebrated by putting up three or four Christmas trees inside his house and festooning the outside with a veritable explosion of decorations. He had a dog named King that he taught to fetch sticks, and he collected toy soldiers. Once, he and his wife took a bus to Gettysburg to see Kenny Rogers.
And that, really, was it—the sum total of his existence from day to day, week to week, year to year. Paint, plant, party, putter. Socialized as I was to be ambitious, obsessive, and driven to achieve, holding down two jobs, having and raising children, and going to school (all at the same time), I didn’t get it—how could this be enough for anyone? And yet he was, apparently, perfectly content.
Many important things really do come down to what people find important, and we are handicapped in our comprehension of the public mind if we can’t grasp what those things are. One would think this is pretty self-evident, but it is not. According to Amy Gershkoff’s article in this month’s issue of Public Opinion Pros, for instance, Democrats’ campaign strategies have not been working well to date because they have been overlooking that it’s not so much who people are as what they get really passionate about that ultimately determines how they will vote. (If you have any doubts about that, just ask Joe Lieberman.) George Bishop offers a vivid demonstration of pollsters’ struggles to determine the public’s real positions on creationism versus evolution, as their various experiments with question wordings strike different chords with respondents—some of them quite unanticipated—and elicit a confusing array of often conflicting responses. And how many times have we seen massive misreadings on the part of public figures regarding what people want and need, and how they might best be appealed to? (Joe can probably tell you a lot about that, too.)
Even if we can see where people are “coming from,” it doesn’t mean we are capable of discerning the views held by those with horizons different than our own. Before we can do that, we need to understand—really understand—not just where those horizons lie, but that they really are different. You can’t walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes if you don’t even know where he keeps the shoes.
Once, in one of my rare forays into educating myself about something that might actually be useful, I read in a book on business management that it is important to remember not everyone grew up in your house. For the first time it occurred to me that just because much of the meaning in my own life derives from endlessly tilting at windmills, others might not be all that interested in dodging the sails with me; they might feel just as fulfilled by quitting at five and going home to have a beer.
As for neighbor Bob, he, sadly, died of a rare and terrible cancer when he was only a few years older than I am now. “What a waste,” commented the woman who lived across the street, “all those Christmas decorations every year. What was it all for?”
Evidently, to Bob, it was all “for” something worthwhile—the decorations and the yard, the horseshoes and the soldiers, the dog and the country music, every job well done—it was “for” enough that he centered all of his relatively short life on them. And, in the end, who is to say whether it was all “for” just as much as my own ambitions and accomplishments will have been when I am gone?
No, he was not raised in my house. And I did not then understand the fulfillment he found in leading his kind of life. That did not keep me, despite my exalted views of my own achievements and aspirations, from wanting to slink away in shame every time I caught him eying my ill-kept flowerbeds or mowing my raggedy side of our adjoining front lawns. And I now understand what should have been obvious before—that he, like most people, saw as much legitimacy in his way of life as I do in mine—perhaps more. My thinking otherwise was sheer ignorance, and arrogance.
It is, quite possibly, just as arrogant to presume we can understand, or even try to understand, what goes on inside of other people's heads. But given the proper humility, a little bit of imagination, and a lot of experimentation, we might manage to get a glimpse of what the world looks like through their eyes, and find ways to reach them across the divide.
—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor
Next month, Public Opinion Pros will be taking its annual vacation. While we are taking a break from the rigors of publishing our otherwise monthly magazine, we will continue to respond to article submissions and proposals, letters to the editor and op-eds, and to welcome new subscribers.
We wish you all a happy and productive eight weeks, and look forward to getting back to you when our next issue goes online in October. |
