Thanks for Listening

People love it when others listen to them talk. For some it instills a false sense of respect towards the communicator, sometimes even importance. Seriously, it's really easy to get a person started. All it usually takes is a simple question along the lines of, "How are you doing?" This in-turn can lead to misplaced trust towards the listener and the revealing of sensitive information. But are good listeners necessarily a good thing? Sure, they might be able to provide the communicator with some outside insight, but chances are the communicator is giving the listener an edge. What sort of edge you can figure out for yourself, I'm thinking along the lines of a cliché if you're confused about what I mean. It's astonishing just how much one sentence can hurt a person emotionally.

Did any of them even realize how closely he watched them? They couldn't have. They couldn't even have suspected. Never saying anything about himself... ...never missing anything they said about themselves...

Comic of the Moment: JLA: Tower of Babel by Mark Waid and Howard Porter