BUT DO YOU HEAR ME, INEZ

One of the most difficult challenges of human intercourse is to make ourselves truly understood. I am supposedly a wordsmith and yet all too often I say something in haste that is totally misconstrued. I think that is a major problem in all our relationships. We "read" people by their mannerisms, how they dress, their voice inflections and the way they present their words, as well as the phrases they actually say. Yet,in this modern world, most communication is done on a keyboard or over a telephone and sadly, too small a per-centage is done face to face. This is a terrible tragedy. We are forgetting how to communicate with one another with our whole selves. What a frightening loss! It is costing us the rich satisfactions, the joyous connections possible a social existence.
In my family, we comunicated around the kitchen table. We discussed our angers, our delights, our hopes and our hungers. We grew to understand one another and we learned whom to respect and whom to fear.
When I say I truly did not like my mother and the materialistic, biased life style she espoused, I know whereof I speak. She showed me who she was on every level.
Today, I have not spoken to my nieces and nephews face to face more than a dozen times. Although I tell them I love them and care about them, I am just saying words. We have no idea who we are to each other or whether we are valued for anything but genetic reasons.
My friends and I talk to one another very often but we rarely SEE each other; and so the inevitable happens: We anger one another with presumptuous remarks that were not meant to be insulting, demanding or insensitive at all. They were written in haste, edited by spell-check and sent without re-reading.
Understanding! Where has it gone? We are in the midst of a communication explosion. The world is overwhelmed with information about every person, every nation, every disruption or discovery in the universe. And yet we have no idea how to make ourselves understood. We don't see the humanity, the beauty...the need each one feels ..the affection, the caring, the grasping for a love we all ache to know.
I find this an immense loss; a modern disaster far greater than Katrina or re-electing George Bush! And so I say to you, Inez: "I know you read me, but do you really hear me...in your heart?"
I like to think you do.