Fall of the Word-Slingers

 I feel like the days of the relevance of Word-Slingers is over.  Days when a writer of conscience could write about the injustices of the world and expect something to happen in response seem to have passed.  The World of Action remains unaffected by so many eloquent pleas for justice. 

 

Is it that our empathy that is gone?  This quality once referred to as “humanity” seems to be absent.  Perhaps the truer definition of humanity is what we are experiencing now.  The behavior of the human race one to another seems to be quite terrible on the whole.  Perhaps the idea of “humanity” being a word to describe empathy and decency was always aspirational rather than a descriptor.   

 

Maybe it is also that words seem to be losing their meanings.  Various agendas use them to arouse feelings and passions regardless of their past meanings.  “Freedom” used as freedom to dominate others.  Equality with no recognition that we all do not start with the same ability to compete.

 

I am a small wrestler with words.  I use them as I seek to express and define my thoughts.  Words used to contain and direct my thoughts, words that help me create tiny pools of clarity in the overwhelmed muck of current events in my mind. 

 

I would suggest that part of the reason for the loss of power by the Word-Slingers is that words become divorced from their meanings.  When a word can mean anything a manipulator says, they have trouble ringing true.  Thoughts of truth or justice get stuck in the muck of a sticky lake of lies that seems to be surrounding us.  How can anything ring true when up has become down and down up?

 

And yet some of us still seek for truth and for stillness that might enable us to perceive more truth.  My political camp or yours; both lie.  We just find the consequences of one side’s lies or their goals more palatable than the other. 

 

And when we wake, what can we find that is actually real?  We see that a tumor in our democracy has metastacized. (My apologies to John Dean.)  Something has grown up in the heart of representative democracy that should not be there.  It has been fed by a system captured by the unaccountable rich.  It has been fed by inequality, and old grudges, and hopelessness, and the easy answers found in lies and partial truths.  It has been nutured with the arrogance and condescension of the educated.  And it has been brought to flower by the greedy and the hateful, those who seek to destroy the good in others because they themselves cannot possess it.  And as it continues, it will surely and inevitably kill what is left of our society, our body politic, and one by one, it will take the individuals that we love and the lives we enjoy.   

 

And I want to write of a solution, but I don’t know what that might be.  Truth.  If only we could see clearly!  Each side has its own version, but there are so many perspectives!  Since we’ve lost the ability to even talk to each other, where is the hope?  Where is the path to reintegration?  Where is the path towards compassion?  Respect?  Love?