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Let Us Not Judge, That We Might Not be Judged Ourselves

11/20/2014

4 Comments

 
Picture
"How you doin' tonight?"
"Typically!" he says. "And yourself?"
"Oh, I'm well!"
"That's excellent!" he smiles. "And syntactically correct!"
"I do my best!"

That was the first guy. With him is a second man, his friend. Both have books. I ask the first fellow what he's reading, and it's a hefty sci-fi tome of at least a thousand pages, about the export of steel across different galaxies. "Seminal stuff," as he describes it, from the great 1960s-70s period of sci-fi. "Asimov, Frank Herbert, all those guys."
"Just a little light reading!" I say.
He laughs with pleasure.

"And how about you, what do you have there?"
The second man turns up from his own book. "Oh, this is, it's about Intercultural Communications."
"Cool!"
"Yeah, it's all about the complexities of communicating between cultures, and how the studies we do can impact those communications and how we apply those results can fundamentally affect decisions people make."
"Oh wow. So it's talking about the impact of the studies themselves?"
"More how those studies are conducted."
"Ooooh."
"Yeah, how the different methods chosen can influence the results and what people do with those results."
"Tight."

Once again, just some light reading. I ask him a few more questions about it. I'm fascinated and want to look it up myself. "What's it called, the book again?"
"It's, uh. Experiencing Intercultural Communications, an Introduction. By Judith,"
I'm scribbling down the title. "Experiencing...."
"Yeah, Experiencing Intercultural Communications. By Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama."
"By Judith Martin."
"And Thomas Nakayama. Yeah, it's really good."
"Nakayama, first name Thomas?"
"Yeah."
"What made you choose this book? I mean, that's a pretty specific focus,"
"I just thought it sounded interesting. And what's really cool is, at the end of each chapter, they have like sixty or seventy citations to other books on similar subjects to what was covered in the chapter."
"Oh, that's a gold mine!"
"Yeah, so if you're interested in this or that, you can go read further, and get all in detail. Which has been super helpful."

These two were not students attending accredited universities. They were not educated businessmen. They were street people, quite possibly homeless, no different in look from so many of the huddled figures we pass on the sidewalks downtown. What was it my elementary school teacher told us when she broke down the word "assume?"
4 Comments
Bekah J
11/21/2014 01:38:11 pm

Ha! That's awesome!

Reply
Nathan
11/24/2014 04:43:59 am

Thanks, Bekah! I was excited by how the didn't seem to think anything was weird about their highly literate / at-home-on-the-streets status!

Reply
Charlie Harding
11/28/2014 05:00:29 am

Nate, i can see that you totally get IT. The humanity is the (thing) I often like to go down to first ave outside the show box and watch the crowd line up for the show, what I get is the massive amount of human potential.

Very much like a tightly wound up spring, ready to unleash a shock of human energy and potential, ready to make some kind of difference or cultural mark on the world.

Theres a kind of ready to spark energy potential about to happen when i witness that kind of crowd. It occures
outside of concert venues as well as on the bus.(do you know what I mean) ?
Blessings to you,
Charlie Harding.
P.S. (s)crappy Holidays. And seasons Beatings.

Reply
Nathan
11/29/2014 09:21:36 am

Charlie,

What a terrific comment to receive! The humanity is most definitely the thing! I sympathize completely. The sensation of possibilities, specifically possibilities of goodness, I see in people, to see it bubble to the surface in some way, fills me with joy.

Scrappy holidays yourself. I'll see you on the road!

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