|
When I was growing up, and would come home with a bump or bruise, my dad had a favorite saying in response to my condition. “It looks like you were talking when you should have been listening.” It always took away a little of the pain and always made me smile. It is a phrase that I use with my kids occasionally, usually with mixed results.
But it is a good little phrase, and if you think about it, there are some true words of wisdom hidden there. There are too many times when we are talking when we should be listening, and that can be detrimental to ones well being. Not that it means something physical will happen to you, what it means is that you always learn more if you listen than if you talk.
It also depends on who is doing the talking and what they are talking about. On the simple end of the spectrum, if someone is giving you directions to an unknown destination, you better be listening or run the risk of getting lost. That’s providing you asked for the directions to begin with. So I guess this example pertains to my female readers only.
If you ask anyone, other than my wife, they will tell you that I’m a pretty good listener. I believe that if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to write these articles week after week. Granted, I am usually writing about the bad things that I hear and see, but you’ve got to take the bad with the good. You just need to be selective with whom you are listening to and how you choose to process the information being given.
Unfortunately, when watching TV, we are all sitting ducks and our worst enemy is the TV commercial. I am finding that more and more people are basing their opinions on information shown there, which if you think about it is really scary. People whose view of the world is obtained from a sixty-second advertisement supplied by a company whose motives beyond selling you a product are unknown.
And it’s not unlike one of those people who are constantly talking and never listening. You know the ones. Even though you know they don’t know what they are talking about, they are telling you misinformation with such conviction, that you actually start to doubt your own knowledge because they are so convincing. You walk away from these conversations totally confused.
TV commercials, being so brief, make it easy for someone to be fed messages in such a quick and uninterrupted way that before you can find the remote control the message/info has been passed along. And for those zombies who sit there and soak up every word that is spewed out, like a sponge, they become walking talking mis-information machines.
How many people have you talked to that have already formulated an opinion, or worse still, a review of a movie based solely on the trailer/commercial for a movie? Without even seeing the movie, they feel that they have sufficient knowledge to recommend or discourage you from seeing it. Nine times out of ten, unless you ask them, they will not offer up the fact that they haven’t even seen it.
And what is with the increased number of commercials for bail bondsmen? Is there a lot more people being arrested? I am seeing them every day telling me how they can make a bad situation better. How about not getting arrested in the first place? The way they present it, you could be going to the store and be picked up on a felony charge out of the blue.
And while we’re still on the commercial topic, let’s see a raise of hands of people who think that Subway’s pitchman, Jared, is perhaps the worst pitchman ever. This guy’s fifteen minutes of fame were up after his first commercial. Because once you take away his freakish ability to lose the equivalent of a human being by eating sandwiches, there is nothing left. I’d like to see what would happen if they cut him loose. I bet he would pack on the pounds even faster than he took them off.
What seems to me to be the worst kind of commercial is what has become in vogue lately. I’m not exactly sure how to describe them. They are like commercials but they are not presented as such. The one that comes to mind starts off as what looks like a medical segment on the news. They say something akin to “breaking news” as they address one malady or another. Then they break from the “breaking news” pitch and straight into selling you on a new medicine directed at the aforementioned malady. After it’s over you feel as though you just got taken by a con man.
Speaking of con men, the latest of these fake newsbreaks is hosted by the king of the TV charlatans, Dr. Phil. But the only thing Dr. Phil is selling is Dr. Phil, and frankly, I’m not sure what exactly that is. How this guy has risen to the height he has, based on Oprah’s seal of approval, I will never figure out. It’s like he’s the anti-psychiatrist, a cross between a professional wrestler, a first year psychiatry student, and Jerry Springer. He practices “better psychiatry” through humiliation and intimidation. He’s a true psychiatrist for the 21st century TV generation.
He either has some sort of mystic spell over the masses or testicles the size of basketballs to be an overweight man who writes a best selling weight loss book. But he follows the description that I mentioned earlier; he spends more time talking than listening. Anyone who has ever been to therapy can tell you that it is the patient who does a majority of the talking. A little something that Phil and his quick fix answers to all ills seems to have forgotten.
So the next time you feel like talking remember to whom you are listening.
The Shrub Speaks: “The world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership.” The White House, Oct. 28, 2003.
B.D.’s Response: So who elected you the President of the World?
|
