Testing for the indifference gene

By Ed Goldman

Do you remember when Hillary Clinton, running for President in 2016, embarked on what she called her “listening tour”? It was intended to portray her as having a connection with the country’s working class.

Sure enough, many of them voted for her—and in terms of sheer numbers, she won the election. But she didn’t listen closely enough, or pay enough attention to, strategically important states, as Trump’s campaign did. They snatched the all-important Electoral College votes, which put Trump in the White House for four horrible years.

So, what happened? In very simplistic terms, Clinton listened but didn’t hear. She heard what she wanted to hear and didn’t go out of her way to hear some unpleasant truths about how blue-collar and other laborers, traditional allies of the Democratic Party, felt disenfranchised. 

Some years ago, I was accused of the opposite semantical problem: of hearing but not listening. 

My spouse at the time insisted I get my hearing checked because apparently, I missed much of what she said. So, I dutifully trundled myself off to an audiology clinic, where I was fitted with state-of-the-art headphones—the kind you used to see TV pitchmen wearing as they sat in a recording studio and said, “Hey, would you like to be a radio announcer?” It was an ad for the Columbia School of Broadcasting, which an off-screen voice took pains to clarify was “not affiliated with the Columbia Broadcasting System,” which we know more familiarly as CBS, the network of Stephen Colbert, “60 Minutes” and, unfortunately, “God Friended Me.” 

I was asked to respond each time I heard a tiny little electronic ping, which got fainter and fainter. I finally said I couldn’t hear anything anymore, which was when the audiologist came into the room, gently removed my headphones and gave me her official verdict.

“Mister Goldman, you could hear a mouse peeing on a blotter in an office a mile away,” she said. I laughed until she felt compelled to add, “You don’t have a hearing problem. You have a listening problem.”

Listening problems probably comprise a national pandemic as pervasive, though certainly not as fatal, as COVID-19. Its symptoms include hearing but not listening when reliable experts reveal hard-researched facts about climate change, vaccinations and the results of the 2020 Presidential election (spoiler alerts, respectively: It may be too late to reverse, they can save your and others’ lives, and Donald Trump made a decent showing but most definitely lost. It also should be noted this was the first and will be the last time I use the words “decent” and “Trump” in the same sentence).

We come to this proclivity for ignorance at a very early age, like the first time one of our little friends is saying something we don’t like—along the lines of, “You did, too, drop the ball” and our reaction is to put our hands over our ears and scream, “I can’t hear you, lalala!”

The serious side of this admittedly superficial gambol concerns the need for us to occasionally bring an extra set of ears to serious moments in our lives.