TASK #22: ALL EARS
“Men and nations behave rationally once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.” Abba Eban
Very rarely are time-worn quotes dead wrong. But this one–by Jewish scholar Abba Eban, a writer, diplomat, politician–if not wrong, is as close to it as possible–just take a gander at what happened at the G7 get-together. Or maybe, as Eban points out, we haven’t exhausted all other alternatives…
Or maybe we have.
I can only shake my head and hope that cooler heads prevail, because damn it, I like Canadians, and I don’t want a frigid stare the next time I cross the border into Ontario.
A screaming match with my wife ended with a spud flung at my head and night on the couch in the garage that my wife calls my “man cave”… After that I decided that I had to allow other people to have other points of view.
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The posturing in Quebec got me thinking about bullheadedness in general, and the overall stubbornness of men in particular. Men have strong points of view. We adopt intense, often rigid opinions on almost any subject under the sun. We will argue about sports, food, sex, money, cars, liquor, movies and politics.
We will argue about french toast, poker protocol and tire chains, not to mention the the best way to bake a potato, which was the catalyst of a screaming match with my wife that ended with a spud flung at my head and night on the couch in the garage that my wife calls my “man cave” but it’s really just a cold, dank, cement-floored garage with broken refrigerator and a tv with digital rabbit ears.
After that I decided that I had to allow other people to have other points of view. And even if I didn’t like the other points of view, I had to listen and I had to try to process them, and in the end, it wouldn’t kill me…
No matter how much you disagree with someone–especially when he’s a Republican and you’re a Democrat, or visa-versa, or you’re from LA and he’s from NY, or you went to Ohio State and he went to that school up north–you’ve got to hear the other side of the arguement.
TASK
Sit down, shut up, and listen. And write down what you hear. You don’t have to change your mind, you just have to open it.
Photo courtesy of the author.