Communication is harder than it looks. Words making right sentence communicate hard is.
Anybody who has been married or in a relationship knows that “fine” can have multiple meanings – most of them bad. “Hey honey, I’m going to go fishing with my buddies.” If the response is “fine” then you’re likely sleeping on the couch.
You would think that with the unlimited resources of the Internet and all human knowledge we could come up with a better way to communicate. Yet, we seem to only shrink complex, detailed conversations into shorthand. “Fine.” “Whatever.” These are phrases layered with landmines.
When you talk about societal issues, this is an area ripe for this type of miscommunication – and for whatever reason, it seems like the Democratic party is particularly poor at conveying complicated solutions in uncomplicated ways.
This is the same group that brought you the term “Global warming” as a way to succinctly understand that water temperatures are being raised around the world, likely due to greenhouse gasses from man-made carbon emissions. There’s probably 10 other sentences to completely convey the problem, but some genius said it was “global warming” and now every time it is 72 degrees in July some jackwagon on the internet says “what about that global warming?” Of course the answer is more complicated. Try summing any doctoral thesis up into two sentences and see how you do.
A recent example is “defund the police.” This should’ve never made it off of the drawing board. You want to really piss off the police? Tell them they’re going to be out of a job. That’s the result that you logically think when you see “defund the police.” Suddenly a department of 500 is going to have Officer Smiley handing out traffic tickets and nothing more. The nuanced and layered explanation is that it wouldn’t defund an already short-supplied department. It would, however, allocate funds to accommodate the true needs of its citizens and maybe not so much with the armored tanks. Maybe mix in some social workers and some community outreach. But the whiteboard said “defund the police” so now it’s blown up.
I get it. Sometimes these things grow exponentially, and you have to come up with a quick sound-bite response before you have time to proof it against the Internet. This is especially challenging in the “cancel” culture that we’re in. If you’re speaking extemporaneously, and you step on the wrong trip wire, you could erase progress in a second.
And it is no more evident that Dr. Anthony Fauci and the smear campaign that’s hitting him this week. A man who has spent decades working with science and facts to advise the government. He would stand at the podium day after day in those briefings and give you what he knows and then what he thinks. That knowledge and eventual advice was ignored, so now he gets to be the scapegoat for an administration that desperately needs a scapegoat.
Communication is hard. Communication under stress and strain is even harder. When the stakes are so high, some might say impossible.
The idea is to understand what is truly being said rather than shortened to a bumper sticker. You good understand words yes today?
(Follow Chris Kamler on Twitter as @TheFakeNed and get his reactions, thoughts and opinions on Landmark Live and almost any social media platform you can find)