Greg Horne, Membership Chair
“Community and Connection”; it may sound a little clichéd, but I believe it’s as good a way as any to characterize something that we RAMs derive from our weekly coffees and monthly luncheons in the Madonna Inn Garden Room. The programmed portions of these meetings – opening remarks, presentations by guest speakers, poems from Brad, humor from Larry, and so on – are a big part of the fun, but so is the informal “table talk” that takes place before the formal proceedings commence. It’s a recurring, golden opportunity to catch up with old friends, and make new ones.
There has been a fair amount of buzz in the last year or so about a phenomenon that has crept its insidious way into society in recent years: the “Gen Z Stare”. This is the blank, unblinking and expressionless look exhibited by members of “Generation Z” – those born between the mid-1990’s to around the year 2012 – in social or workplace situations where a verbal response would normally be expected. Instead of responding to a simple question, or engaging in small talk, these young people just stare back at you, appearing to be completely disinterested.
Ask a Gen Z’er about this, and if you get an answer at all, it’s likely to be that this is a totally natural and appropriate response, a virtuous refusal to engage in meaningless chatter or offer up the false positivity of a smile. But I don’t buy it. I think it’s simply an indication that these poor youngsters have never learned to communicate in the real world. The constant presence in their lives of handheld devices – the endless texting, the constant scrolling through websites, the compulsive posting online of their latest “life experience” – have all got in the way of acquiring the basic interpersonal skills needed to engage in actual human-to-human conversation.
We are so lucky to have been born before all this nonsense! Of course, our own handheld devices are of practical use to us in some situations, and an email address, possessed by almost all our 170+ members, makes certain types of communication much easier to accomplish. But these avenues into the digital world are no substitute for genuine interactions in the real world. Our skill at “small talk”, acquired in the schoolyard, honed at teenage parties, and perfected by the office cooler, is the hidden lubricant that facilitates those satisfying conversations at SLORAM meetings – with friends both old and new.