Over the Fence:
By Brandon Dyer, Executive Director of Community Renewal of Pottawatomie County
Easier To Feel Than Change
W
hen my wife and I were first married, I worked for Nextel Communications at their corporate office in Oklahoma City. Do you remember Nextel? They had the “walkie talkie” phones with the pushto-talk feature. They later merged with Sprint, and now they are a forgotten name. To be honest, I hated that job, but I loved my boss. His name was Ed. I think Ed hated his job, too. Like me, he didn’t really care about phones; he cared about people. I still have a notebook from those days with notes from staff meetings. There is not one note about sales projections or quotas. The notes are leadership quotes from Ed. He loved building people, and I was a willing student. He consistently encouraged us to care about people first, and he meant it. The one thing I remember him saying all the time was this: “The deepest desire of the human heart is to be heard and understood. Your job is to sell phones, but your mission is to listen to people.” I’ve thought about that so many times through the years. Sometimes, you hear something, and it just resonates as truth. I think he’s right. People, deep down, just want to be heard and understood. I know I do, but if we all want to be heard and understood, someone has to do the listening. Sadly, human beings are far more adept at speaking than listening. Have you ever seen two people arguing where
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both parties are raising their voices at the same time and continuing to get more and more frustrated with each other? Someone has to be the listener or else everyone walks away miserable. Some of you have no doubt read Steven Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Habit five is, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” However, I wonder if Steven might allow us a special exception. If we were allowed to make one small edit, perhaps we would have the makings of the first step to the healing of our nation. “Seek first to understand.” Period. Oh, we can’t always understand, not completely, but given the gut-wrenching heartache we have witnessed on our phones and televisions resulting from the heartless murder of George Floyd, is it possible for white people like me to put away our human
need to be heard on behalf of our black neighbors whose cries have fallen on deaf ears for centuries? No more counters and rebuttals. Just listening and learning. Once we understand better, let’s do better. African-American author, James Baldwin, was born in Harlem in 1924. In an interview with the New York Times in July 1977, he acknowledged fleeing to Europe to escape the “everyday insults and humiliation, the continual sadness and the rage.” In reference to returning home, he told reporter Robert Coles, “Of course, people tell me all the time [back home] that they are trying, they are trying hard. Some have tears in their eyes and let me know how awful they feel about the way our poor live, our blacks or those in dozens of other countries. People can cry much easier than they can change,
a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street." We are all outraged and distraught by these events. Yet another unarmed black man killed by police, but James Baldwin’s words are too often true. “People can cry much easier than they can change.” We are moved, to tears even. Then, the next event catches our attention, and we move on. May it not be true this time. May we finally say enough is enough. May we subject ourselves to the deep, deep soul searching required to drive out even the tiniest remnants of racism hiding in the darkest chambers of our humanity. May we speak out against any form of racism, be it overt or covert. May our country truly be the land of the free as we at last learn to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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