The Talk

Time for One, or Several

We need to talk.

I am surrounded by a cacophony of distraction passing for truth: a banner head in the NYT tells me the indictment of a former president changes everything. \Really?  Everything? Vladimir Putin is more “isolated” than ever, we’re told. Right after the Xi visit to Moscow and the machinations of the Wagner group in Africa? I am assaulted by really stupid stuff on YouTube, FaceBook, Tic Tok that would push me down the rabbit warren into anger, greed, grasping, or celebrity-worship. There is a reason I don’t own a television set.

The cacophony is not real. It distracts, slips around truth, sells anger, exploits division. It markets a fictional moment, passes on, and I am hungry again. It is impermanent noise. It is the opposite of “the Talk.”

The Talk, is about truth-telling; it is a direct interaction, person-to-person, about what is important, what is real, what is lived. Many of us, and I do not exclude myself, avoid the Talk.

The big Talk we hear about is the important one Black parents often give to their children – the streets are not safe out there for Black Americans. Mere differences in melanin make life threatening. A cop mistrusts what you are doing on the corner or hanging out in front of the 7/11. A woman crosses the street as you walk along it. The white guy on the bus makes angry faces and mutters to himself because of your noisy conversation. The white parents blanche even more as you come in the door with their daughter. The merchant’s careful sideways glance in a store. And so much more.

That’s the Talk a lot of Black kids get.  But let’s call them “Talks,” because there are many more.

There is the Talk about what it means to live in this world as a girl and a woman. I heard that Talk recently, as six or seven women told their stories on line, the stories we don’t usually hear about abortion, first sex, dating, power imbalances, coming out to Mom. Some of the tellers got the Talk as kids, about the dangers of patriarchy, preparing them for life in a world where men assume they can harass, comment, touch, even rape with impunity. 

Then there is the Talk I never fully had with my own children about sex and sexual safety. As I sat in a NYC Yellow Cab years ago and tried to start the Talk with my 12-year old daughter, she stopped me with: “Dad, I think I know more about sex at my age than you knew at my age.” She was probably right; I never fully found out. I grew up in the dark ages compared to her.  What I knew about sex and sexuality at the age of 12 might have filled a thimble.  My older son didn’t want that Talk; I never even tried it with his younger sibling; they would probably have reacted the way my daughter did.

Life is full of opportunities for the Talk. There’s the one I could give now, about getting older and losing competence. If we talk about aging to each other, it is usually an “organ recital” – my kidneys, your balance, my diabetes, your hip replacement, my cholesterol.

And we become invisible. There is a subtle societal shaming of the elderly.  We become stupider, are good for baby-sitting. Strange activities become odd to the children, as the young man said in Alice in Wonderland:  

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
    “And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
     Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

“In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
     "I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
     Why, I do it again and again."

Old people face the reality that we cannot do what we used to be able to do and we won’t get it back. This is part of the Talk we all need to have. We cannot walk as far; language memory starts to slip; hands don’t grip the same, the guitar chords/piano keys just don’t respond. Keys, glasses, cell phones develop a mysterious capacity to move out of sight. New technologies are frustrating because we did not grow up with them and our grandchildren did.

We need to talk about how medical practitioners treat old people as children, as a nuisance, packing us into diagnostic boxes, throw pharmacopeia at us, suggesting we need to hurry along for the next, younger patient with some kind of future.  “It’s time to be put out to pasture. Diminish your life, move, retire, think smaller and less able,” they seem to say. Pure objectification; many younger doctors don’t even know they are doing it.

We need a personal and national Talk about the dignity and wisdom of elders and what they can do. About what it means to walk through the rest of life with diminished step, declining body, and decaying mind, but a lot of talent and wisdom. About the fundamental reality that every person alive today will grow old, get sick, and die.

That’s another Talk many of us avoid: death. I am taking a 12-month course this year with Spirit Rock called “A Year To Live,” based on Stephen Levine’s book of that title.  A safe container for 600 of us treating this year as if it were our last. Not everyone is over 65, but we will all die.

And there is the Talk about gender and sexuality. The Talk we should have when one of us, or a child, friend, spouse, partner “comes out.” What an interesting phrase, “comes out.”  Leaving the shelter and standing in the sunshine, present in one’s fullness. Too often, the talk we get is one that says “go back into the closet; keep it to yourself; you are damned; it is not real; get fixed;” or even, “I will kill you.” Instead, we need a Talk about acceptance, love, inclusion, genuine curiosity. This Talk still needs a lot of work.

I could go on. So many needed Talks, instead of the mindless chatter about stupid, corrupt presidents and movie stars. Like the one about structural racism so many Republican governors are trying to stifle. The one about the frying of the planet right in front of us that policy-makers don’t see or fail to act because they are too deeply embedded in or indebted to the fossil fuel economy. The one about class: the disparity of wealth and income that is slowly tearing America apart and the need for a labor movement that can defend people falling further behind. The talk the Israeli people have been having for the last couple of months, but a conversation that has yet to acknowledge that the Israeli people will only have true democracy when the Palestinian people have democracy. As Fanny Lou Hamer said: “the truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.”

We need to Talk to have a better future.  Not a media circus that spins us up, leads to chatter over our virtual water coolers, and leaves no residue of action behind.