There is a new trend in modern thought that claims that words are near powerless. That a cat is only a cat not because it is articulated or related to any idea, but because there is a tangible four legged furry animal in our mind. To this I say what animal, what object, can come to mind with words like liberty, freedom, or hate. Are these words then superfluous human inventions to justify fortuitous action? NO. We need not look far nor wait long to see the fallacy behind this irresponsible idea.
Words are what caused a compassionate desert carpenter to be feared by the world’s greatest empire. Words are all Frederic Douglas had in slavery and with those words he rose above to “become human once more.” Starving, tortured, and broken Elie Weissel only had words to help him try and survive the horrors of the Holocaust.
As beautiful as this human ability is, there is a dark side to it. For each case of transcendence, and creation there is constriction and destruction. The dogma of the Romans, the racism of our country, and the eugenics of the Nazis. All of these were propelled forward by words. For it takes something powerful, not ethereal, to make a man look in the eyes of a child and pull the trigger.
This kind of power is contemporarily called hate speech. It beats against our common goodness and tears at our natural empathy until we see another as no more than an animal, all because he looks different, or loves different, or worships different, or even talks different.
It is what caused the murder of innocent students and leaders at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Laramie, Tucson. These are extreme examples of course, and yet they all have their roots close to us. It starts small; commie, whore, Yid, terrorist, faggot, nigger, illegal, gook, and it makes you squirm a little in your seats. But never mind, it passes. As time goes by it passes. It passes if you are white, it passes if you are male, it passes if you are straight, well off, naturalized, quiet and don’t forget to keep your head down. And if you aren’t? It sticks to you. It churns in your head. It can become a part of how you think. Eventually it has been said too much; internalized too deep.
We have seen where this leads earlier this year when the suicide of several homosexual teens was taken up by the media. We cried and said how sad it was. A week or two later we had moved on. Some of us even continued to say “that’s so gay.” Or even “fag.” Can we be blamed? It is just a word. It floats off the tongue so lightly. And yet do we know what these words carry when we innocently let them slip. Do we know that fag reminds of the time when men and women were burned alive on bundle of sticks, called a faggot, for being true to their love? Do we know that gook tells of the dehumanization of an entire people to help scared young boys feel justified in killing their fellow man? We of course know the terrible history of nigger, but oh no we don’t mean it like that. It is a term of endearment. And I don’t mean “gay” I mean stupid. Words mean what WE want and that is our justification.
Do you think gay and lesbian individuals ignore the history? Do you think African Americans do? Jews? Hispanics? Men and women marginalized for any hue or creed? It is not their responsibility to know what we mean but ours to realize the history of what we say. We inherited these words along with the wrongs of our forefathers.
So what do we do? We can take personal responsibility. Most of us in this room already have. And many others, including myself, have pledged to be more conscious of our responsibility. Each working hard themselves not to engage in even innocent slurs. That unfortunately will not stop the pundits, the ignorant, or the narrow minded. Our silence cannot drive out hate.
We can legislate. It has worked so well for other causes in our democracy. But that can step on our first amendment rights. But it is this amendment that can bring us to the answer. For while rights and privileges should always be upheld, we can now more than ever see that they come with a responsibility. That responsibility goes beyond silence. It is the opposite of silence. We must fight. We must exercise our right to extents unprecedented. Not just to stop the hate towards us but towards our brothers and sisters.
Look to the history of that beautiful amendment. In a land of majority rule it is there to protect the voice of the minorities of all backgrounds. It opens a door, but it is us that must step through. It is us that must keep this door open through the tumultuous winds of 24 hour news, and internet overload. For no matter what gallop polls say, or the media reports there are still minorities in our country whose words are not heard waiting for someone to walk through that door. Rev. King said “a leader is not a follower of consensus but a modeler of it.” This same man also showed us the power to lead inherent in all of us. The first amendment is not for the abuse of the mainstream or for the few but for the people. A leader is for the people, all of the people. He or she must not let words insulate them in a cocoon of mindless babble and dogma until for them words truly have no meaning. For it takes a leader to seek other minorities and other communities and other words. It will take many leaders to stop our most entrenched problems. Truly as the Rev. said “everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
We all have a group we feel comfortable marginalizing. Think of the disabled. Well they don’t know it’s offensive, or maybe it is because they don’t have the same capabilities, so they must not deserve the same respect. Or maybe you feel just a little uncomfortable around our Muslim brothers and sisters. You have never read the words of their holy Quran but you HEARD it teaches hateful things. You can insert any community you want to marginalize into these statements. So long as we have not heard their words enough and therefore we are able to justify this racism to ourselves. It is attitudes like this that allows hate speech to continue. For until we become our brother’s and our sister’s keeper this cannot stop. We must actively strive to learn the history of all those around us. Learn their words and the way they live. For when a gay man is beaten to death in Laramie, it is all of us that received the punches. It was all of us tied to the fence. When a Christian girl is killed at Columbine, it was all of us that pulled the trigger and all of us who had to stare down the barrel. When a Muslim cultural center is forced to move, it is all of us who are forced to feel ashamed of our religions and all of us who lose our freedom of religion. We must feel the weight of our collective history that burdens each word we say. We must fight the light nature of words in our sound bite culture.
This will be far harder for us to do than it seems. Not just because of effort. It requires that we put down our cause for a day and immerse ourselves in the words of others. You may find yourself in a place where you are the only Caucasian person, or the only Hispanic person, or straight person, or homosexual person. But you must still stand there and speak your words and listen to the words of these foreign brothers and sisters around us. You will be scared by these new words or even angry. But when you clench your fist, take a deep breath, and do what Martin Luther King Jr. did so well, unclench your fist and open your mind. It is hard but remember, it was the strange and foreign words of Thoreau that inspired Gandhi to adopt civil disobedience, and the strange and foreign words of Gandhi that inspired Martin Luther King to do the same. As they opened their eyes and their mouths so must we.
We must do this for what is at stake is everything that makes us human. For words are our creation not our gift. And though words are powerful their power lies in OUR breast. So with this power we have a responsibility tied to it. And this responsibility is tied to our history. And our history ties us to each other. For when our brothers and sisters are killed or take their own lives, we all lose a sister, a mother, a father, a friend, a teacher. And we lose the words that will help dry our eyes and make us laugh together again.
I am in love with words and I fear losing the power that they carry and the people who carry them. Fitzgerald, Elliot, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Douglas, King, Kennedy, Lincoln, Washington. What could we do without their words? What could we do without those around us, forced into the shadows by hate speech? For we all create these great words for each other. We can only lose our collective humanity. But we have the world to gain and uphold.
Rev. King once preached that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” As I said before language was not a divine gift but something we struggled for centuries to create and cultivate. Now, as in all times, the power we have invested in the words of our languages is being used to cultivate, not the highest creation we are capable of but the base instinct to violence. This misuse of our faculties lies on all of our hearts and all of our shoulders. For until we decide to be leaders, to leave the trenches of verbal warfare and to climb up to that city upon a hill we have so long strived for, we will have to live in fear of one another. Our continuance of hate speech can only lead to hollow words for a hollow human race capable of nothing save destruction. Our alternative is to find the leader in our selves and take that beautiful city so high up by storm. To walk through the door left open to us by our founding fathers. For it is us that must walk. No one, divine or corporeal, can take us there. But the prize is far worth the discomfort caused by foreign words. For when we finally enter that city we will see the beauty of our words in their fresh and diverse incarnations. And only once we are there can we look back and see that the most precious things we have, each other and our ability to empathize, stood moment by moment on the edge of chaos and was worth the entire battle. For the world will always note and forever remember the words we say as we walk this earth. It is up to we the living to protect this power of words for our posterity and to teach them by example the responsibility that accompanies it. All that we are, all that we have, all that we could ever hold dear hangs in the balance.
No comments:
Post a Comment