Cantstandthat

.
.
.
Little Foo from Earth found himself alone on a spacecraft. How he got there he could not recall. Also he could not guess where the spacecraft was going or why it seemed to be operating by itself. Foo felt quite unprepared for this trip, even though he realized he must be on an adventure, since he felt nervous and enthusiastic at the same time. At least it seemed he was not going to have to go to school, church or his room for a while.
Before Foo had too much time to become familiar and comfortable with his new life, the spacecraft arrived at its destination and began gently to descend. At first glance, the planet did not seem very different from his own. There were mountains there, a desert over on that side, rivers now and again, and at least one ocean; and as he got closer, he saw streets and avenues and roads and highways, two bridges, various farms that seemed to be doing okay, and all the different kinds of buildings that his perceptive eyes had learned to recognize back home.
He noticed some interesting differencesfrom Earth in some of the details, but they didn’t seem all that noteworthy. There were a few colors he did not recognize, there seemed to be something like snow right next to one of the deserts, and there were a few buildings that looked like obelisks turned upside down and sticking in the ground, which looked a little strange, but lots of the planet’s inhabitants were coming in and going out of them as if they were office buildings or luxury hotels, so they did not seem all that unique. In fact, as he thought of it, Foo figured that if anything, these slightly strange sights were happily instructive. They just served to confirm that indeed he was on a planet other than Earth, a nice bit of information of which to be certain. Other than that, he could probably expect most things to be rather familiar. That was a pleasant prospect. Indeed it was.
As he peaked through one of his little windows, he whispered to himself, “I guess I’m going to have to get out and do some exploring. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble for nothing if I don’t. I guess I could stay in here and wait for somebody to come to me, but who knows? Maybe a spaceship landing is no extraordinary occurrence here. I might just be sitting around waiting for an incurably dull period of time, missing my destiny, and then the spaceship would suddenly take off again and I’d feel like a real numbnod.”
Ordinarily, Foo would have been off that ship and running toward adventure practically before its engines had turned off. But there was that other rather strange thing that made him more anxious than he let himself admit. This planet's inhabitants – which he began to see for the first time as the spacecraft was completing its landing - seemed quite human in every way, except... Well...
Everyone seemed to be walking around with their hands pressed against their ears. Everyone seemed to want to keep their ears covered as much as possible. Everyone! It looked very strange indeed. At first he thought that maybe they were doing this because of the noise of his spacecraft’s rocket engines. But no. Even after the engines had turned off completely, there they were - all those hands, still covering all those ears for no apparent reason.
Foo got off the spacecraft and enjoyed a pleasant walk to the nearest town, noticing others walking here and there, but not conversing with anyone. He was still rather uncomfortable about the whole hands-covering-ears thing.
His discomfort increased considerably when, upon his arrival at the town, he noticed other curiosities related to hearing. Whenever they could not avoid using their hands – for pumping fuel into a vehicle, or carrying groceries, or some such – they would immediately make sure that their hearing remained artificially impaired. They would pull down the sides of long, tight hats that looked like they were made of something like rubber. Or they would stuff any helpful material into their ears – tissue paper, cigarette butts, bits of food and the like. He even heard one old gentlemen ask a kind lady to cover his ears for him while he placed some packages into the trunk of her car. She complied as if it was no strange thing. What made this doubly strange was that the two were trying to carry on a conversation during the whole process, and had to practically scream at each other – even though all they seemed to be discussing was the nice weather.
And these two were not the only ones screaming. Because everyone was jamming up their own hearing, anyone who wanted to be heard had to really work at it. At certain junctures, the boy had to cover his own ears just to get relief from the noise.
Then he began to notice other distinctive characteristics of the culture. Everyone’s shoulders and arms were unusually muscular, evidently from constant use. All voices were rough and harsh. The most prominent citizens seemed to be those who could talk the loudest and the most aggressively. Many of the wonderful things that delighted the boy seemed unavailable to these people: the sounds of gentle breezes, crackling fireplaces or waves striking a beach; whispers between friends, private conversations. Human interaction was characterized by a certain rudeness or defensiveness. There were severe limitations placed on the simplest delights, like joy, love, family life, or learning. Many potentially rewarding activities were simply not attempted.
How strange this is, thought Foo. And being a bright boy, he thought more about it: How in the world could such an impractical custom arise? Did they start yelling because their ears were covered? Or do they all cover their ears because everybody’s yelling? Or is there some other problem that I have not yet discovered? Can’t they see how complicated they have made their lives for seemingly no reason? Can’t they analyze their predicament logically and come up with a reasonable solution? Or are they even aware that they are in a predicament?
But analytical thought requires some degree of physical comfort, and the poor boy’s ears were ringing, and his arms were beginning to hurt from having to put his hands to his ears continuously. He decided to walk back to his spacecraft to think about it.
What the boy did not know was that he had landed on the planet Cantstandthat. Less than a hundred years before the boy’s visit, the planet was called Goodenough and was a rather pleasant place to live, as planets go. But then some huge, horrid-sounding object, hurling through space with a great scream, was drawn in by Goodenough’s gravitational pull. Indeed, it had come dangerously close to crashing on to Goodenough and destroying all life thereon.
Happily, it missed. But sadly, the many years it took for it to approach, just miss, then move on had changed the lifestyles of all the Goodenoughians. That's when they became the Cantstandthatians.
The memory of the horror of that sound became the driving force of Cantstandthatian civilization. All music stopped, since it could not be easily heard. All conversation became shouting. The tissues and muscles related to speech became large and strong and hard out of all proportion, as did the muscles for raising hands to ears, just as Foo had noticed. Political forums and government actions became completely unrealistic, since it was so hard to really talk and work together over differing viewpoints. Marriages suffered. Confused and frightened children grew up to be passive, resentful adults. Religion, rather than nurturing the soul, had been reduced to various rival factions too weary to try to understand each other.
But the greatest tragedy was not that life had become a grievous shadow of what it had been. The greatest tragedy was that this grievous shadow had come to be what everyone thought of as normal. For no reason other than unnecessary but habitual deafness, terrible things had eclipsed pleasant things, and nobody knew it.
How difficult the boy’s visit to Cantstandthat was. How disappointing to try to communicate, let alone to make friends. How strange he seemed to all who observed him; strange precisely because he was not deluded by the common delusion, precisely because he was truly normal. And how terrified he was at the response of the Cantstandthatians when he inquired about their strange ways, then tried to help them rediscover normalcy.
His strange behavior was disturbing enough to the others: speaking so softly that he could not be heard, resting his arms at his sides, even trying to pull their hands away from their ears at the most inappropriate times! But then, when he began to speak up and be heard, that was simply too much. Some labeled him mentally deficient and ridiculed him; some sought to help him by taking him to an asylum; some were frightened of him as of a criminal. The boy’s visit would surely have ended in tragedy had he not escaped back to his spacecraft and left the planet completely.
To this day, he sometimes wonders if anyone on Cantstandthat ever thinks about him and what he tried to communicate.


Copyright Donald L. McIntyre 2003