Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Grievances Arising from Covid and Beyond

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We may want to act, but in some cases the best we can do is react.

One of the apparent effects of long-term stress is that we are more inclined to engage only to assert rather than listen. We seek the psychological release of airing our feelings, leaving our conversational partners to function only as recipients of accumulated complaints. Add in the sour national political mood, and additional stressors of everything ranging from getting children vaccinated, to acknowledging existential threats like climate change, and we are ready to reload our rhetorical canons and keep firing.

Under these circumstances, becoming active and empathetic listeners is all the harder. Most of our energy has already been sapped by rumination and complaints. We are hardly prepared to pay what I once called the “energy surcharge” of active listening that requires taking the time to focus on the feelings of others. You can check yourself on this by recalling the last time you felt the need to write done what another was saying.

Anecdotally, we see forms of “unloading on another” all the time: in videos of passengers arguing with airline agents, unhappy customers using the frail medium of the phone to lodge complaints, or in news reports of political rallies, where everyone present seems to be on a short fuse.

Reaction as a Substitute for Action

In times of stress we may want to act, but in most cases the best we can do is react. And so our rhetoric turns expressive and argumentative in the hope that our words will achieve what seems to be beyond our direct control. For example, it was one thing during the height of the pandemic to be warned that we should stay out of crowded spaces. But for some it was a step too far that our favorite travel destination or restaurant was temporarily off limits. We seem unable to accept a message that requires altering our most fervent intentions: a condition that can launch us into a high rhetorical orbit. Even in the face of solid evidence, hearing an alienating “no” from another is rarely going to be accepted as the last word.

Then, too, there is the apparent promise of an end to the global nightmare of COVID, though that moment seems further off than first thought. And no sooner have its life-threatening negatives begun to subside than other pandemics of social resentments have become more virulent. The many work and family displacements from COVID that added hardships seems to have emboldened many to press forward with ongoing demands for greater gender parity, friendlier workplaces, better childcare, less sexual and racial bias, and corporate reform. An insistence to be heard first and engage later has added new challenges to previously settled relationships. Interactions with employers, family members and even friends now seem more cautious and transactional. They define the current period of superheated identity politics that has become fully transformational: perhaps unwanted by many, but no less real.

With so many interpersonal bonds in flux, it can be hard to know whether the future holds more rebukes, or a placid period of exhaustion and quiescence when we might again hear each other with more understanding.

Seventy years ago, the nation still waited for needed forms of human empowerment. But news of the new polio vaccine created a wonderful pause while the nation celebrated its good fortune. Polio would no longer claim more of its children. In contrast, we seem to be in a time when embedded social inequalities have seeded resentments that have made the nation less interested in savoring our successes.

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A Low Tax Dystopia?

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

It seems like only the most punitive souls would enact legislation that mobilizes the dead hand of reactionism.

This website is predicated on the assumption that there are better, if not “perfect,” responses to exigencies that need remedies. Humans are problem solvers.  Challenges that block our objectives are met with responses that—with some effort and empathy—provide suitable solutions or workarounds. In the realm of communication studies, “exigency theory” is a bedrock idea used to explain why humans are motivated to verbal or physical action. In this model, a policy that is enacted by a political unit should be a response that solves a persistent problem. Without this core assumption, the ongoing enterprises of our political life can’t make much sense. We rightly assume that policy is guided by the impulse to ameliorate a serious condition or injustice.

All of this brings us to the policy-making processes unfolding in some of the states. Many along the southern tier of the nation are benefiting from a continuous migration of families and corporate headquarters to warmer climates, where the candy of low tax rates and available workers easily outweighs sometimes failing school and social services. And this gives rise to a paradox.

Policies that have a basic effect of exposing people to greater risks are hard to fathom.

Political bodies particularly in Texas seem determined to enact policies that create challenges rather than alleviate them. Newly enacted laws that impose hardships on individuals are difficult to fathom, especially when it is evident that no greater social good is being served. Specifically, the state’s executive and deliberative bodies have faced several challenges where something approximating a perfect response eludes them. To be sure, we can have different policy preferences.  But it seems like only the most punitive souls would enact legislation that mobilizes the dead hand of reactionism, for instance: allowing citizens to deputize themselves as bounty hunters to criminalize women or girls who are trying to end an ill-timed pregnancy; permitting firearms to be carried on to the campuses of public universities;  prohibiting the teaching of the nation’s checkered racial and social history in schools; or forbidding institutions to require face masks to stem the spread of disease. These sorry examples of reactionary policy may help explain how a school administrator in the Lone Star State could have reminded teachers dealing with The Holocaust to be sure to teach “both sides.”

It is impossible to imagine how citizens are made safer or more secure by these examples of ersatz leadership. It only adds to our sense of dismay to know that seventeen members of the Texas congressional delegation sought to void the election of President Biden and disenfranchise four other states.

Of course, all of this pretends not to notice the obvious: that our political life has become a series of calculated set pieces: dramas of status and resistance intended to be more expressive than instrumental. We know the impulse when we would like to scold someone rather than try to find common ground.  As the Austin-based journalist Molly Ivins once noted, “three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo.”  None of these postures need much cooperation from others; they are also not up to the demands of policy-making in the 21st century.

Corporate Texas generally shelters itself against the rest of the state by settling in enclaves surrounding Austin, Houston or Dallas. But companies like A.T. & T., Frito-Lay, Dell Computer and (most recently) Tesla, need to begin to notice that they are at least indirectly enabling parties and candidates mobilized to sabotage the fragile machinery of governing. At least from the northeast, it is hard to see key political figures like Governor Greg Abbott as authentic public servants. At some point he must have supported actions to make the lives of his constituents better.  But from a distance they are hard to find.