Part Three: Getting Along With People

Well, you see, getting along with kids (one's own especially) includes allowing them to watch their drivel on television. Nevertheless, when I hear atrocious grammar, and appalling cliches, I DO point them out to the older boy. I started to do this with more relish when a screenwriter on the writer's message boards boasted about his cartoon dialog writing. Nasty, nasty man.

Being an energetic, focussed listener is a great way to get along with people. Have you too found that to be true? Some minds might feel drained by having to listen to the speaking of others.  Some? Most? Anyway, there's something called 'Being gotten.' Damned if I know a colloquial equivalent, which right there tells you it's not a popular concept. "Dig it?" That's as close as I can think of. But it's not any part of 'Being gotten.' "Dig it?" is really only an invitation to share my prejudice. There's an arrogant flavor to the phrase.

Being gotten is a very great gift. It means that the listener has grasped every nuance of the verbal communication and is able to separate the content of the communication from all their judgments and opinions. We tend to talk by exchanging attitudes and preferences, rather than by ideas and narration. Heaps of conversation is carried on by the speakers finishing the sentences of others, like birds in huge numbers anticipating every swirling motion of the others: group think. There's a place for group think -- in time of desperate war for example -- but it's a far cry from being gotten.

So rare is the phenomenon of 'being gotten' that the norm is just about no one is ever being gotten. So what's true is massive non-communication. Someone I know Online, and only Online, seems in her life to have been so battered from never, ever having been gotten, that it has become an unconscious habit to instantly, and always to contradict what you have just said. It will come as no surprise when I tell you that this person's journal allows no replies. Imagine! Self-imposed exile from having been so abused by her loved ones all her life by their never listening to what she had to say, she has surgically closed her ears. It is as if she has institutionally established permanent not getting along with people. Self-punishment, of course, is always the most severe.

The subject of getting along with people is so tough I simply must talk about it in installments. I hope you will give me this leeway.

Barry