“Can we talk?”

Joan Rivers, the late, great comedian, used to ask this question all the time as the setup for her routine. But seriously, folks, can we?

Here’s something I didn’t learn in school: how to talk with people. That’s not entirely true. I’m sure I got a lot of new vocabulary words, and even some practice in oral communication, but to really talk to someone? I don’t think I learned that in school, but I wish I did.

I did learn to speak respectfully. After all, I learned I’d better not talk disrespectfully to my teacher (or a police officer, for that matter), that’s for sure.

And I was certainly told to “be nice” to my classmates (and don’t ever, ever be a bully), but when it came to talking about hard things, about topics that matter, about subjects on which we see things differently, about our relationships, and be able to do more than just respectfully disagree, but to uncover our deeper understandings so that we can work to solve real problems? Did I learn how to talk in that setting? Did I learn how to speak peacefully, and without violence?

Look around for a moment at how people are communicating. What do you see? There’s certainly a whole lot of talking going on, especially through “our devices.” In fact, much of our cultural, political and personal conversations take place over the internet.

And the topics are, in some cases at least, critical to our survival, so these are not trivial concerns. And any solution we humans will create will come through cooperation and compromise (in a word, communication), so the stakes are certainly high.

One of the most disturbing developments I’ve noticed in recent months isn’t just that this nation is “so divided,” (honestly, if I hear that phrase again I just might scream, which probably won’t help anybody), it’s that there is an unwillingness to even sit down and talk with people with whom you disagree. What happens when we shut down our capacity to listen to another person, when we effectively shut them down and refuse to even consider listening to what they have to say? The inherent judgment in that refusal is undeniable: “YOU are SO WRONG! In fact, you’re so wrong that I can’t even listen to you!”

Is that ever going to work? Think about it. How are we ever going to solve problems if we don’t learn to talk effectively, which in great part means listening to people you think are “wrong,” “stupid,” maybe even “crazy.”

That’s a hard job. In order to do that, you need to inhabit their thinking so you can imagine what it’s actually like to be them. You need to suspend your judgment for a time and simply be curious and seek to see the world through their eyes, and to entertain the possibility that they arrived at their understanding just the same way you arrived at yours: through life experience.

Then, on an even deeper level, you can begin to understand that, despite all of our infinitely unique life experiences, we are all fundamentally the same.

Nearly 20 years ago, Marshall Rosenberg wrote a book titled “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.” This book serves as the basis for the course, which has been taught around the world: Fortune 500 companies, government offices, hospitals, inmate rehabilitation programs, to name only a fraction of the organizations that have embraced this concept. And yet in so many places I look, what do I see but its absence, starting at the top with our leaders. How can we expect our young people to create a more peaceful world when the most effective way to achieve that goal is absent from the curriculum? All the problems we face can only be worked through difficult, honest, and fair discussion: in other words, civil discourse so that we can find the common ground between us. And here’s the amazing truth: it can be taught!

Gay Collins is a retired Waterford Public Schools teacher with a master’s degree from Connecticut College who lives in Preston. She can be reached at yagspill@gmail.com.