EXTENDING THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMUNICATION AND CARING
IN MY OPINION
--Michelle Ling

In high school, I was in the school's madrigal group.  The men wore tuxedos and the women wore long black dresses, and we sang and danced our way around greater Los Angeles area rotary functions, senior citizens' meetings, Christmas parties, etc.  The demands of the group required a certain amount of talent and reasonably good looks, so the people in it tended to be part of the "in" crowd.

Except the year our instructor accepted Marc.  Marc was a year behind me,and I was told he was bright, but mainly I remembered him from junior high school as a painfully thin, chronic stutterer. I would occasionally notice him scuttling from class to class, sidling down the hallways, his back permanently hunched over from the weight of a behemoth backpack, with his small, acne-riddled face staring at the ground. 

And then he showed up in Madrigals.  It wasn't a mistake.  Our instructor let him join for some reason, maybe as stutter therapy for him.  The truth be told, he was not a good singer, and danced rather like a newly hatched buzzard.  Mostly, he sang very softly and tried to be unobtrusive.  In this he was successful.  The rest of us simply ignored him, except the poor girl who couldn't because she was his dancing partner, but she, too, tended to suffer silently. 

In my junior year our instructor fell ill and, as the group accompanist, I was left to lead the group at the school's spring concert. Taking advantage of this lack of adult leadership, Marc's partner decided to save herself the humiliation of dancing affectionately with Marc in front of the entire school, and just before we went on stage, she disappeared.

So Marc was left without a partner, or a clue what to do. Usually, when someone misses a performance, the solo person forms a three-some with the next couple over. Marc tried to do this, but for whatever reason, the couple next to him made a concerted effort to ignore him. While the group sang, he timidly but urgently nudged them, begging to be let in.  They refused.  So, like a runt piglet trying to get a sow's teat, he moved on to the next couple, and the next.  He finally reached the end of the line and stood alone on the side of the stage, utterly lost, and still singing all the while.  I don't remember how the concert ended, but I do remember our singing being completely drowned out by the roaring audience.  And I remember grabbing Marc afterwards and screaming at him about the basics of showmanship and stage competence.  Infuriated and humiliated in my worst, selfish, teenaged way at being associated with this fiasco, I exhorted him to try to just act normal for once. 

I didn't do Madrigals the next year, and in fact completely forgot about Marc until my little sister called me in my college dorm room two years later to tell me I was ruining her life.  She explained that a psychologist hosted a school assembly that day, and in the midst of a forum discussion about loss, none other than Marc had gotten up and identified me, by name, as the person who was most important in his life, and stuttered to the whole school how much he missed me.

Me!  I had never really talked to Marc, except for the time I yelled at

him, and didn't even consider him a friend, much less an influential friend.  He must have had some serious psychological problems, but I had no idea what they were, and never wanted to find out.  I suppose that no one had ever paid him any undivided attention before - even unkind attention.

The reason I say all this is because I forgot all about Marc again, until today.  I've spent four days attending discussions and speeches on how to fix the worldwide mess we're in, and my head is packed full of the incredible wisdom and inspiring ideas of the participants here.  But I leave each one thinking about my twentysomething friends, and how incredibly cynical they are, and wonder how in the world I'm ever going to get them off of their butts to put some of these ideas into practice.

And I'm just as guilty.  Sure, we all want clean air and water, we want social justice and ethnic harmony, we want dignity for all living things.  But the problems seem so incredibly huge, and we know that it was our parents' generation who did this, not us.  So we feel as if  we inherited an ugly mess that isn't our fault, and we grow a bit surly, and a bit hopeless.

I have asked every thinker and politician I've met at this conference how we are to inspire Generation X, and most people have been helpful, but Jane Goodall was the best.  Our leaders are just talk, I said. Then go and find people who act, rather than talk, she responded. They're out there - there's thousands of them, she said.  But I doubt I can get my peers to get involved, I complained.  You only need to get two of them, she said.  If you get just two, and they get just two, then you see how it spreads?  Surely you can get just two people, Jane said.

She serenely rejected every naysaying comment I made, gently encouraging us to just do what we're able.  Make a window box.  Walk a dog.  Play with a child for a minute.  And share the inspiration with others.  That's it.

It was a thrill to talk to her, but I left a little frustrated, because I

still couldn't believe that walking a dog would change the world.  But then I remembered Marc, and I realized that everything we do really does matter, and sometimes in a big way, even if we don't do it on purpose.

So we've got to be really careful, and not be lazy, and try hard to do the right thing.  Maybe playing with a kid won't change the world.  But what if it does?  We really can't afford to pass on the easy stuff, can we?  I wish I had known that in high school, when I met Marc. 

--Michelle Ling
26 year old Graduate Student, UC Berkeley
mling@rosebud.berkeley.edu