by Marisa Demarco
Daily Lobo Columnist
My friend told me this story:
Last week, some guy approached my friend while he was walking and asked him if he had a couple minutes to chat. Thinking the guy was a nervous-looking Jesus freak, he decided he would treat him respectfully, but decline the religion sale when it came up. He told this hesitant guy that he could walk with him to his job, maybe also planning an easy escape should the conversation get uncomfortable.
The guy told him that he had been thinking about something recently - no one asked anyone what they thought about anymore and this bothered him. In spite of an evident shyness, he decided that each day for the rest of the semester he would ask someone what they were thinking about and then write it down. So he asked him, "What are you thinking about today?"
Still perhaps wondering if he was being sold something or converted or being tricked into some ploy, he told the guy what he was thinking. They walked and he told him he had been thinking at that particular moment about the politics in Iraq right now.
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And that was it. Really, the guy just wanted to know. He had been asking for a week, and my friend was the first person to actually respond. Which makes an interesting parenthetical statement on the wariness with which we treat people, always wondering what we're going to have to give up in the interaction.
My friend said he really emptied out for the guy, began telling him everything about himself, even though he hadn't asked. The guy was neither prying, nor unwilling to listen and asked open-ended leading questions like the best of interviewers. He also said he felt the walking format was a good one because they didn't have to look at each other directly and they could relax.
When I heard this story, I thought, "Damn. That's some direct activism." I also like how the guy was doing it, even though he was uncomfortable and wasn't receiving the best response. In a very practical way, he took this huge, general, theoretical problem and came up with a feasible start to a solution.
This approach is admirable. The first apathetic assumption when thinking about a topic as broad as this notion that no one asks anyone what they think about anymore, is that this is just they way things are. The second is that even though the guy thinks he can do something about it, he really can't in a realistic sense.
But he is and just by engaging in the act of asking, he is making a change in a very tangible and satisfying way.
My friend thinks this is very punk rock.
I didn't see him and I don't know him, but just hearing the story gave me an affection for him. I want to know what people tell him.
I also wondered if he had approached me, how I would have responded. I thought about how when the Greenpeace people talk to me I look down, smile, shake my head and just keep walking, vaguely irritated.
The same goes for the Bandido guy and most homeless people. Then I wondered if he had already approached me, and in my hurried way, I ignored him and forgot. The very idea of it makes me kind of ashamed and maybe a little sad, too - like I became one of those jaded assholes.
So think about it. Do you listen well? How many of your conversations are genuine and not of the waiting-for-my-turn variety? When was the last time you were engaged in what someone was saying to you - enough so that you wanted to know more and just shut-up to hear it?
When was the last time someone asked you what you thought?
