Words Matter

It was 1967 and I was 16. We saw our brothers and fathers shipped off to a useless war half way across the globe. We cut classes and protested, peacefully, chanting “Hell no we won’t go.” Does anyone remember that? On the racial front we had Martin Luther King’s words “I have a dream.” Did you think it was just a slogan? Look how many peacefully rallied around him some even willing to die. The decades have passed, slogans have been created and buried, but the great ones, the ones that moved and motivated live on. “Black Lives Matter” now being cried out on our streets in the midst of a pandemic has rallied peoples of all colors and ages to gather together and change the way our nation does business. And I sincerely hope <>Lewis’s “Good trouble” will also be shouted from the rooftops and down the alleys and side streets of our hurt cities.
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Behind these great motivating slogans, uttered by great Americans, there lies a dark underbelly of words. Words spoken by individuals who wish to continue to divide us, take away our Constitutional rights, toss the rule of law out the window. Individuals who wish to convince us that science is wrong, that the pandemic is a hoax, all in order to allow the person running this great country more time to destroy it.
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100 years ago a pandemic raged this country and the globe, just as it does today. But the politics were very different, the scientists weren’t demeaned and discredited, and falsities were not able to spread through social media as truth because there was no social media. Today, more than ever, words matter. One wrong word, one misconstrued press briefing, can spread like a virus via social media. We’ve seen how this can affect the nation thanks how one individual uses his Twitter account. But the sad fact of today is that there is no one can monitor the truth in all these postings, fact checking like in the old days of printed newspapers is impossible. Who are we to believe?
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Words of falsehood and the virus of the pandemic are at an intersection. Both spread unchecked. The vaccine for the virus is still a dream but will eventually become a reality. Sadly there never can be a vaccine created to protect us against words of falsehood. Words matter… I will be writing more about that in future posts.