By James Carroll
MANY YEARS ago, I spent a summer as an intern in a mental health clinic. Part of my training to be a pastoral counselor involved writing so-called “verbatim reports’’ of my encounters with clinic patients. The reports involved after-the-fact writing up of exactly what the patient said and what I said in reply, a close record to be evaluated in consultation with the training supervisor. This morning, I came across old notebooks that I kept at the time, including first drafts of such reports. Out of a residual commitment to the confidentiality of the encounters, I won’t extensively cite the verbatims here, but I can’t help but take them as an encounter now with my much younger, and callow, self.
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“I don’t know words,’’ he told me. My thick-headed initial response — “Sure you do!’’ — makes clear that I could not imagine a grown man lacking such rudimentary skill. When I finally understood, I saw what deep embarrassment, and even despair, T felt. My urge was to fix his problem straight away, and I am embarrassed to read my glib assurances that learning to read was no big deal, that he could surely do it if he tried, that he and I could work on it together. No problem.
Over subsequent weeks, we met every day, hovering over the sports page, looking to match photographs with key words like “golf’’ or “ball.’’ Soon enough we were working not on words, but letters. Problem. I discreetly taught him the alphabet song. In truth, when it came to teaching adult literacy, I was as illiterate as T, and all we really succeeded in doing was to enter the realm of struggle and frustration together. Across the summer, I recorded all of this in the verbatim reports. That my main memory of my supervisor’s responses is a reflexive grimace suggests that he was not especially impressed with my efforts on T’s behalf. For his part, T was patient and generous. That someone had quietly partnered with him in his fiercest wish seemed enough. When I bid him farewell late that August, he was still not reading, but he was no longer alone either in his ignorance or his shame.
What do I make of that now? I still respond to problems wanting to fix them straight away, and I can still offer glib assurance when only diligent, skilled, and sustained effort will do. As a people, we Americans have been acting like that. When President Obama took office, wasn’t it with the expectation (his or ours?) that intractable crises (choose one) would be readily resolved? No problem. We spoke of “hope,’’ but meant magic. Now we blame Obama. The left and the right, in the echo chamber of cable news and the isolation chamber of the Internet, agree on nothing but the president’s woeful performance. But how was he supposed to fix a culture of ignorance that regards itself as too smart for criticism?
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