Exercises

Does Anybody Really Care?

This cry of despair is more common than we may realize. Some of us speak these words rarely; others say them every day─silently or aloud. To hear the cry for help requires extra-sensitive perception. We can hear it only if we listen with the third ear, a trenchant phrase of Theodore Reik.

For example, I often visited a Negro friend in a home for the elderly. The place was sterilized and the environment was sterile. My friend was old, dispirited, and he wanted to die. He often said, "I'm a lost ball in the tall weeds." He felt unfulfilled. He knew that if he had been white, he could have been a successful professional man. "I think about this every day of my life," he said. Who cared about this Negro workman who had helped erect many buildings in downtown Columbus? Hardly anyone.

We have been remiss both in caring for and caring about the elderly. Perhaps they suggest too strongly our own morality, the guilt we may deservedly or undeservedly feel about our own aging parents. The Great Society needs a more creative approach to what are euphemistically called the golden years. The program of the First Community Village in Columbus, Ohio, and other similar centers may be a happy augury of things to come.

Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, "O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!" To care for people is to wish to be close to them, in their presence, to penetrate the mask we all wear. It is interesting that our comments about communication with other people include such expressions as "We were very close," "I was deeply touched," "He was greatly affected."

To care deeply for persons is to see them not as plumbers, scientists, clerks, lawyers, mathematicians, or as white, yellow, or black. It is to see them as unique individuals with all their idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses, their similarities and differences. Caring is color-blind, uncalculating.

To care or not to care is a problem of communication. Sol, the instrument maker in Dombey and Son talked to his nephew about Mr. Dombey. The nephew said, "I thought he didn't seem to like me very much." "You mean, I suppose," Sol replied, "that you didn't seem to like him very much." When the mutuality of caring does not take place, we often put the burden of its absence on the other fellow. We may thus hide our true feelings.

Indeed, the popularity of the mask as an art form in all cultures suggests that we have a public face and a private face. Interestingly enough, the word "personality" comes from persona, meaning "an actor's mask." We ask reporters who know public figures intimately, "What is he really like?" Many articles appear with the heading, "What is the real John Smith like?"

Perhaps our wish to unmask others but to remain masked ourselves betrays a fear that our weaknesses will be discovered and disapproved. And conversely, the revelation of our hidden strengths may appear boastful. Sometimes, too, we do not want to disclose openly our unfriendly attitude because it is socially unacceptable. When we are rejected by someone, we tend to say, "I couldn't care less," meaning "I couldn't care more." Or we may not want to reveal even to ourselves that we care deeply about someone, for fear of rejection.

The wounds of rejection go very deep. Shakespeare said, "He jests at scars that never felt a wound." But even those who have been deeply hurt do not automatically learn to care for others in the same predicament. For example, a North Carolina high school boy was doing badly in his classes, and felt that no one really cared. The director of audiovisual instruction asked the boy to help build a high school radio studio. He did this skillfully and joyously, and his whole attitude seemed to change.

But one day he said to my friend, "You know, some day I want to be a teacher." When asked "Why?" he replied, "Because I want to make other kids suffer like I have suffered." His wounds were only partially healed.

All caring has hazards and the outcomes are uncertain. To care for others and to let them care for us is a creative experiment in communication in which we may get hurt. But the price paid, the risk of being wounded, is the price of all communication. It is because we ourselves are hurt that we can understand the Oliver Wendell Holmes, "A man must share the sorrows and joys of those around him under pain of not having lived."

Some cannot exchange love because they are emotionally and psychologically barricaded against loving and being loved. Dostoevski has Father Zossima say, "Hell... is the suffering of being unable to love." This inability to care for others, to love and be loved, is a theme of many great books. Dombey, for example, could not communicate with his young daughter Florence. Of this, Charles Dickens writes:

   "There were some children staying in the house. Children who were as frank and happy with fathers and with mothers as those rosy faces opposite their home. Children who had no restraint upon their love, and freely showed it. Florence sought to learn their secret; sought to find out what it was she had missed; what simple art they knew, and she knew not; how she could be taught by them to show her father that she loved him, and to win his love again."

Florence could give love but her father was unable to receive it from her.

How do we learn to care for others and to welcome their caring for us? How can we develop children who have "no restraint upon their love and freely show it?" The translation of a desired value into reality is not simple. T.S. Eliot has pointed out that

Between the idea

And the reality...

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.

How can we discipline ourselves to make the dream a reality?

As teachers and parents we can talk less and listen more. We need more sensitive antennas. We are not picking up the faint signals of discouragement, concealed anger or fear of failure. The voice of despair may be weak and need amplification. And we must get these messages early, before they explode into violence and we shall be compelled to listen to angry shouting.

It is not hard to care for people who are very much like ourselves. This is a form of self-admiration, narcissism. But it requires rigorous self-discipline to be concerned with, to care about those who are different. It is difficult to care for someone thousands of miles away, or for those at hand who do not act or dress conventionally─the so-called hippies, for example. We must ask, "What are they trying to say?" Are they asking, "Does anyone really care?"

Is it possible that we are rejecting the ideas of young people in the guise of rejecting their style of dress? Remember, too, that conventional dress changes, as every woman knows. If we don't admire a person who is wearing a beard, long hair, and sandals, we must ask whether we would prefer to see Christ pictured with his shoes shined, his hair cut short, and clean-shaven. I have a friend who has a beard and who puts up his long hair like a woman. I might add that he is an Indian, a Sikh.

We also have difficulty understanding people whose food habits are different than ours. However, the man who thinks it strange to eat raw fish as they do in Japan is fond of oysters on the half-shell. Some who think that bird's nest soup is "for the birds" enjoy eating the gelatin that comes from boiling the skins and bones of animals. And those cheeses that we like so well are made from milk that has stood long enough to putrefy. We do not use this word, however, but prefer nicer terms such as ferment, cure, or ripen.

Caring develops best on a plane of quality, of mutuality. We unconsciously assume that our way of life is superior; that of other people's, inferior. I once heard a distinguished network broadcaster end an interview with some able foreign students by suggesting that on their return to their own countries they "spread the American way of life." How would he feel if, after visiting England, he was asked to spread the British way of life in the United States?

We have expected gratitude from foreign countries for our gifts and loans. Look what we have done for them! But strong bonds of mutuality are not built in this way. Instead, they require that we care enough about people to do things with them rather than for them. Giving as unequals, we can easily develop an attitude of patronizing, immodest self-congratulation. We like to help the underdog, forgetting that this places us in the role of the overdog, the person who has the power to grant or to withhold favors.

Are children grateful for what their parents do for them? They should be, considering how often they have heard about it. But caring and loving must not be evaluated too soon. Caring takes time. Love is patient.

Caring must be learned. Children in the same family may differ markedly in their willingness and ability to share friendship and affection. Bonnie, at the age of three, already has a charm and grace in human relationships that her older brother still lacks. A seven-year-old boy announces that he will not give money to the Junior Community Chest. "There's something peculiar about it," he says. So his nine-year-old brother gives for both of them.

No one expects to master the skills of tennis, basketball, or the dance by a few easy lessons. Hundreds, yes thousands, of hours of grueling, skillfully coached practice are necessary. Is it any different in matters of delicate human relationships? Caring requires the same disciplined practice.

Are children and young people in school mastering the art of caring? Are the current heavy emphases on formal subject matter, on competition to get into college or graduate school resulting in more impersonal relationships between teacher and students? Are newer tools of technology which can be used with large groups actually decreasing the personal contact between teacher and student? They could be used to increase the interaction of student and teacher, to humanize the educational process─but are they?

Christina says in Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine that "In all times, in all societies, the supreme act is to give oneself to find oneself, to lose oneself to find oneself. One has only what one gives." But how often is this "supreme act" performed? How often do we give ourselves to find out who we are? Do we really care?

(1 853 words)

(From Can You Give the Public What It Wants?, New York, Cowles Educational Corporation, 1967 )

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