Words have power and must be protected against degradation.
Words convey deep emotions, knowledge, understanding, hopes and fears.
“I love to feel where words come from,” said Papunehang, chief of the Delaware tribe,
After listening to John Woolman pray in English—a language Papunehang did not understand.
Words, even when spoken in another language, have significance.
“Words can be polluted even more dramatically and drastically than rivers and land and sea,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge. “Their misuse is our undoing.”
Words are what we use to teach, inspire, defend truth and seek justice.
Words have extraordinary power.
Words can elevate the human spirit: “Ask not what your country can do for you…”
Words can also pull down the human spirit.
Words can be debased.
Words can be weaponized.
Words can be misused.
Trump’s misuse and weaponizing of words is “pernicious and dangerous”.
Have you listened to him? Most of the time his words are “an incoherent word salad.”
He seems unable to string sentences together that make sense.
He uses words to “demean, belittle, bully, or dehumanize.”
He lies intentionally and with a straight face.
“He says what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the reality of things.”
Some people think this makes Trump a tough guy—it doesn’t.
No! Reality is reality. There are no alternative realities.
“The point of modern propaganda,” says Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, “isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
“Without truth and a common factual basis in our national life,” writes Peter Wehner in “The Death of Politics,” “a free society cannot operate.”
If we can make up our own reality, our own script, our own set of facts…what happens to objective truth? It dies.
Words can do that!
Words can pull down a democracy.
Words have power, even when debased, weaponized, and misused.
As Muggeridge says, words can pollute and their misuse will be our undoing.
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