The Melting Pot
So it’s 6:30pm, I’m on the A train heading uptown. Standing on this crowded afterwork rush hour train I came to a realization about something. Being on this crowed train I’m realizing no one is talking/communicating with one another. You had the occasional friend and colleague take the train and chat but not the mass majority. Now I’ve traveled to various places and have seen how other people of the world communicate when in a massively diverse setting. This was something different, it was as if the people on the entire train car were in their own realities/bubbles. Oddly detached from one another, not a single hello, smile, and or head nod. So I thought ok, “we’re in NYC! The Big Apple!, The Melting Pot!…but yet we aren’t to social with one another. Whats going on?”

My point being in this all, is that there is a disconnect but also a strong sense of miscommunication between us all to actually socialize with one another. Now when I say miscommunication/disconnect, we tend to have responses where we shy away from people when they say hello or give the casual head nod; be it the person sitting next to us on the train, or someone at your local coffee shop. We do this not because we can’t communicate, but because we may not understand the manner in what that stare or head nod is coming from or means. We are caught evidently doing this when we see someone looking at us on the train we unlock our phones [mobile phones have made the escape far to easy and accessible], open some popular social media platform an or put our headphones in and play music. Now personally speaking yes sometimes we aren’t in a mood to associate with anyone. We are either dealing with day to day life or mentally focused on something else, but we should however give these situations more time and consideration. Communication has always been apart of the human genome and the development of our societies. If we are to truly build a multicultural society (Melting Pot) we closely need to look at ourselves as well as put aside some of the preconceptions we have of other people and actually take a chance to experience and educate ourselves.
The next time you’re out on the streets, the subway, the local Starbucks say hello to someone, smile, nod your head, start a small conversation. Let’s break these invisible barriers we create around ourselves.
M.Gordon aka KingWzrrd