Lori Falce: Take off the headphones and listen

I have a love-hate relationship with part of my son’s head.

His earphones.

Oh, sure, you may argue they are not actually a part of his head. You would be wrong. Prying them away is very much like pulling out fingernails or a tooth. It’s dangerous work best done while he is asleep or distracted.

I love them because they protect me from things I don’t want to hear. YouTube videos by people way too entertained by the sound of their own voices. Long narratives of video games studded with the exclamation “No way, bruh!” Something he refers to as “music” that seems to have little to do with melody or rhythm.

I hate them because they very efficiently isolate him from me. They keep him from answering me when I need him to put on his shoes and go to the car. They reduce me to a screaming harpy when I am only trying to tell him dinner is ready.

But more than anything, they make us sit in separate worlds when we are in the same room.

More and more, it seems like our whole world is wearing headphones — the expensive, noise-canceling kind that provide an all-encompassing environment where the only thing we hear is what we choose to hear. Where we can pretend that the only real world is the world in which we have chosen to immerse ourselves.

Some of those worlds are political — right and left, red and blue. Some are religious. Racial. They isolate us by geography or by class. By gender or by sexuality. They may overlap, but usually by choice, not chance.

We are so cozy inside those worlds that when we realize someone is outside, screaming at us to get attention, we only notice the screaming and feel threatened.

We can blame the bubbles of media, and trust me, plenty of the people who email and call me do just that. But is that accurate? Or fair?

When people are choosing to put on headphones, it isn’t the fault of the music. I can’t blame my son’s favorite YouTuber for the fact that he doesn’t listen to me when I tell him to clean his room. That’s on him for not listening and on me for not finding a way to get through.

But as frustrating as it is to sit next to a child who is existing on another plane, I know that breaking through is possible. I can turn his face to me, or push the headphones off his ears. Or he can choose to come up for air. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes.

That is so much harder when we are isolating ourselves in the bubbles we have defined for ourselves. It requires more than a momentary decision to hit the mute button.

It demands that we acknowledge that this small slice of reality that we are living is just that — a sliver of the whole.

It isn’t just that there is right and left or even right and wrong. It’s that we are living in just one degree of perception, but you need a whole lot more degrees to make a complete circle.

We need to pull off the headphones and listen to people who are different from us, not by force but by choice. YouTube and TikTok and Facebook are filled with face-to-phone confrontations between people whose perspectives are colliding. When that happens, it is almost always because someone isn’t listening.

Because until we choose to make that move, we are just sitting on the same couch, wondering why no one else is listening to what we are saying.

And no one’s room is getting cleaned.