“Communications—maybe that’s the big thing!”

“Communications—maybe that’s the big thing!” is Ish’s formulation of a central claim about how communities change: isolation can make a society conservative and dependent on the past, while contact with other societies can unsettle that stasis. In a conversation with Em after a community discussion, the phrase becomes both a case for rebuilding a more creative life and a contested argument about the dangers of contact.

Isolation and Cultural Stagnation

Ish argues that a nation or community cut off from others may become conservative and then retrogress, gathering remnants of the past and freezing at the point where isolation leaves it. He compares this pattern to George and Maurine’s collecting of old things, and speculates that something similar may have happened to Egypt and China. In his account, communication matters because contact with another civilization can loosen a society and get it moving again.

The argument reflects Ish’s wider dissatisfaction with a life organized around salvaging what remains. He recalls having urged the community to live more creatively rather than merely continue as scavengers, and says he had made that case even when their first baby was expected. Em replies that, despite hearing the idea many times, it still seems easier simply to go on opening cans. The exchange places his broad historical theory against the practical inertia of their daily life.

Em’s Counterargument and Ish’s Reply

Em questions whether contact should be treated as an uncomplicated good. She points to Indigenous people who came into communication with white people and to her own people on the coast of Africa encountering slave traders. Her examples bring the violence of historical contact into a discussion Ish has framed around cultural renewal.

Ish answers with a counterfactual: if slave traders appeared over the hill without warning, would the community not be better prepared if scouts had first gone to Europe? He suggests that the harm arose not simply from contact, but from meeting a powerful outside force without prior knowledge of it. He is pleased with this reply, but Em remains unconvinced; her silence and her qualified response do not amount to agreement. Their disagreement leaves a tension within the expression itself: communication may provide warning and loosen stagnation, but contact can also bring domination and harm.

The Water Crisis and the Need to Prepare

Ish connects the debate to the day’s immediate crisis: the water has stopped. He warns that the end should not come suddenly in the way the water failure has, linking his call for communication and creative living to the need to anticipate change rather than discover danger only when it arrives. The water interruption gives his abstract argument a concrete urgency: a community that relies on inherited habits and salvaged supplies may be poorly prepared for a sudden failure.

The expression therefore names more than contact as an ideal. In Ish’s reasoning, communication is a means of learning what lies beyond the community, recognizing risks before they arrive, and escaping the stagnation of scavenging. Em’s objections prevent that principle from becoming a simple celebration of progress: knowledge of the outside world may prepare people for danger, but contact itself is not necessarily benign.