Commentary

MILT THOMAS

That is probably the universal question asked by teenagers, wives, bosses, customers and just about any two people having an argument. The answer was famously expressed in the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke, with the line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

By the way, I still can’t understand how he ate 50 hard boiled eggs in one hour and didn’t go into cardiac arrest. But that’s beside the point.

Communication has been a problem since humans first learned to speak. Humans lived in small tribes where they developed a system of grunts and groans that each member understood. But when they met another tribe, that tribe used different grunts and groans, so they ended up killing each other or trading grunts for groans. That problem and its solution still exist today. In Kenya, where there are 42 different tribes, each with its own language, they developed a common dialect for speaking outside of their tribal families. It was called Swahili.

English has become the tribal language of pilots and air traffic controllers. I once flew with a friend to Montreal and it was at a time when French Canadian controllers refused to speak English. My pilot did not speak French of course, so we had a near collision on the runway. It was a definite failure to communicate.

But we must deal every day with tribal languages and the failure to communicate. It’s funny that when we see a drug commercial on TV, the voice over spends most of the 30 seconds telling you why you should not use the drug in language we all understand (may cause dizziness, heart palpitations, diabetes, death), but the minute we walk into our doctor’s office, he or she speaks in a tribal tongue foreign to us. We nod in agreement, too embarrassed to ask for a translation, so the doctor thinks we speak his language.

We all have our tribal languages – the computer tribe, the lawyer tribe, the car salesman tribe, you get the picture.

I have attended several meetings in Gifford recently where the county staff tribe presented plans to update the Gifford Neighborhood plan, using terms quite familiar to graduates of city planning school – zoning, infrastructure, solid waste – well everyone knows what that is. The 200 or so residents of Gifford though, were members of the mostly unemployed tribe. We have all been members of that tribe at one time or another so we understand the language of people who have no money, mounting debts, survival budgets. Those meetings I attended in Gifford were not unlike the meetings I described above of two hunter gatherer tribes.

At the last meeting, one of those Gifford residents made a communication breakthrough. She suggested that instead of the county tribe organizing a meeting to explain in their language what they wanted to do in the Gifford community, why not let the Gifford tribe decide what they needed and then translate it to the county in a language they could both understand?

Now granted, I was at those meetings as a member of the journalist tribe, conversant in many tribal languages, so I saw this as a breakthrough of sorts, kind of like when Columbus landed on Hispaniola and asked where they served the best Indian curry, but the residents understood immediately that these tourists planned to stay.

And not to beat a dead horse, but it was also like a few weeks ago when the City of Vero Beach tribe finally understood what the residents of Vero Beach tribe was telling them at the budget meeting.

I hope the Gifford and county tribes can engage in a dialogue where they actually communicate with each other in a language they both understand. Don’t you? Grunt if you agree.