An Encounter with a man who is willing to listen to you while fireworks are going off

Last night I stopped to talk to Kip Clark, a young man who devotes free time to listening to anyone who has something to say.

The Independence Day fireworks have always been a big deal in Boston. People pack the streets along the Charles River which separates Cambridge from Boston to watch the pyrotechnics every year.

I wandered out of the apartment we keep in Kendall Square, the heart of Biotech in MA, to stroll along the Cambridge side of the river. Thousands of people had gathered on lawn chairs and blankets hours before the show was supposed to start.

It was a breezy, comfortable summer evening. The Boston skyline was particularly exquisite against the deepening blues of the skies to the East. A perfect day for fireworks!

Folks of all ages were there, happily munching on food they had carried on trains and on foot. Memorial Drive, the main thoroughfare which snakes along the river Charles from Harvard University to M.I.T., had been closed off to auto traffic for the occasion.

Of course gatherings of this size require a security presence, just in case.

July 4th has taken on a completely different meaning to me as an adult. In my view the public has been sold an illusion of self-governance, sovereignty and freedom. Denizens of our country are being surveilled ever more closely while the government, ostensibly for and of the people, is allowed to keep “secrets” that are too dangerous for the public to know.

Our government was crafted to protect the privacy and agency of the people. We have created the exact opposite of the country our founding fathers had envisioned 250 years ago.

I couldn’t help wondering what I was doing there. I eventually turned away from the river and walked against the torrent of foot traffic telling myself I that I just wanted to find a place selling gelato before the show started. I ran into an old friend and former roommate who was hustling to get to a good spot.

He was there alone too and invited me to join him. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t about getting gelato. I just couldn’t stomach the bread & circus meant to entertain while the empire was collapsing. It was too much to explain. And why would I choose to ruin the spectacle with dystopian ideas? We went our separate ways. I wandered off not knowing what to do or where to go.

And then, sitting alone on the steps of one of the iconic MIT buildings was a young man holding a sign that read:

“Free Listening”

I was intrigued. What was he doing there? What was he offering? Was he truly more interested in listening to a stranger who needed to be heard than the pretty lights in the sky?

He was.

His name is Kip Clark, and he told me that he has been coming to the steps of 77 Massachusetts Avenue, directly across from the MIT student union for several years, just to listen to anyone who feels that they need to be heard.

I took him up on his generous offer. I gave him my perspective on the country and the patriotic flavor of this holiday. I told him about my difficulty of weighing my desire to let the innocent, well-intending people have their feel-good fantasy against the need to shift public opinion about our leaders and the current state of our nation.

Kip was a very good listener. Continuous eye-contact. Appropriately timed nodding. He was either very interested in what I had to say or very skilled at feigning interest. But I wasn’t there to convince him, nor was he there to be educated. I was there to speak my mind, and he was there to witness it.

I then went into the challenges of being a physician who supported a wholesale reformation of our public health system in order to regain public trust in the very establishment of which I was part. I let him know that extricating ourselves from our predicament required medical professionals to do exactly what he was offering: listening openly. Why were the most educated deaf to other opinions and blind to what was happening?

A few more people sat themselves on the steps with us. I offered them an example of medical establishment hubris outside of public health. I told the story of the first public demonstration of anesthesia across the river at the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital 180 years ago. Why haven’t we discovered the mechanism of such a simple molecule like diethyl ether or any of the other anesthetic gases? Isn’t it obvious that it is because we have chosen a paradigm that is incorrect? How can we ever attribute our interactive, multi-sensorial experience which we call awareness to molecular interactions?

Near death experiences in the hospital during cardiac arrests blow away the idea that awareness arises from our physiology and that it must be local to our physical bodies (very often the subject accurately recounts their own resuscitation from above).

What would happen, I asked, if we accepted that this experience which we call life is actually just a brief chapter in a potentially endless tome of incarnation and reincarnations? Can we agree that if we don’t see that we are all connected in ways that transcend our skin color, political affiliation, cultural and religious stories we will continue to orbit the sun tormenting each other over past deeds indefinitely? Why are we blind to the fact that we are literally going in circles?

How do we know that we, the souls on the planet, weren’t also responsible for the terrible deeds of humanity in the past? How can we possibly know who exactly is more culpable right now? Given our present state of ignorance around the larger context of our collective life experience, wouldn’t the only sane course of action be to drop our weapons, forgive and help each other?

More people gathered near us. The fireworks started, but nobody moved. We couldn’t see them but we sure as hell could hear them. How different were the explosions echoing off the buildings around us from those heard by helpless human beings who have been caught in the crossfire between military machines which they themselves funded and manned with their own sweat and blood?

The “bombs” bursting in mid-air prompted me to go on, going into detail around false-flag events in our history.

The Lusitania.

The USS Maddox.

And of course, 9/11…

I let my growing audience know that dozens of mainstream media sources reported explosions in the buildings during their collapses yet none of them challenged our governmental investigators who blithely explained that ruling out explosive events was unnecessary because nobody reported hearing any.

We were treated with a salvo of ka-BOOMs perfectly on queue.

What are we to do if the free-press, our only guardian against tyranny, is in cahoots with our government?

A few more stragglers on their way to the river stopped to listen to my harangue. They were young adults in their twenties. I let them know that I was most interested in the plight of their generation. They would have to better inform themselves and each other if they wished to liberate themselves and their children from the mess my generation and previous ones had created or sustained from investing their energies and trust into systems that have long proven their futility in addressing the interests of the body politic.

The blasts from overhead continued as I dropped more truth bombs. Is there really so few out there who can see the folly in celebrating our strength in this manner, I asked?

The skies went quiet. I stopped. I said my piece. I felt heard. Nobody said anything. This wasn’t about weighing in. It was about simply listening attentively.

A few pedestrians passed by walking away from the river followed by larger and larger crowds.

A young man stopped and let us know that his dream of being able to live in Boston would never be fulfilled because it was just too expensive.

Another person paused and started to tell us his story of how being Jewish and raised in a Zionist household has put him at odds with both his family and his pro-Palestinian friends. He didn’t know where to stand. All he knew was that he was apparently standing alone.

Kip Clark nodded silently and then asked if he had anyone he could go to for emotional support. The man shrugged his shoulders.

A gaggle of well-dressed young Latinas stopped at our curious gathering and went quiet. One spoke up in a delightful Spanish accent and asked why men were so opposed to getting married. Her eyes went from curious to angry to desperate.

She stared blankly at Kip’s measured and encouraging response. There was too large a language barrier. The group left, their heels clicking on the sidewalk.

Two young MIT undergraduate women approached looking very hesitant.

“Do you have something to share?”, asked Kip. “None of us know each other. We are all strangers, but sometimes it is easier to say something to a stranger than to a close friend.”

They looked at each other and one spoke up. She told us of how she was obsessed with the fact that she was unattractive. How she longed for attention from boys of her age. She would receive some from time to time, but she was convinced that it had to be unauthentic interest. She felt sorry for any boy who was caught talking to her in public. Nobody could be interested in someone who looks the way she does. She was despondent that every other nineteen year old sophomore was enjoying their lives to the fullest while she couldn’t.

It was heartbreaking for me to hear these stories. But we weren’t there to console or advise. We were there to listen.

Listening has a zero risk of untoward effects. In this world of pervasive confusion just listening may be the only way through.