WORDS CAN KILL

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me”.

This old English language children’s rhyme soothes kids that get yelled at, bullied or called names and implicitly advises kids not to retaliate if the pain inflicted is merely coming from insults, slights or demeaning words. But our adult world is different. Strong, vulgar and hurtful words matter a great deal and, paradoxically, are likely to harm the utterer of the words more than the recipient.

In our political world, it has become common practice that you will say just about anything to get elected, including disparagement of your opponents. And our current President is a world champion in this game of thrones. Listening to him, and his most ardent followers, there is no middle ground. Opponents are never ‘misguided, ‘ill-informed’ or ‘on the wrong side of an issue’, but either ‘crooked’, ‘terrible’ or ‘a disaster’.

The speech pattern of our commander in chief is by now utterly predictable and has not really changed from his campaign rhetoric. Even at a high profile, solemn occasion like the inaugural address or the talk at the national prayer breakfast, the President adhered to this pattern: first you describe how badly others have failed and then you assert that there is no need to despair because you elected me and I will solve all your problems. “The world is in trouble, but we’re going to straighten it out. O.K?”

If we follow the 45^th President in all of his antics and utterances by tweet and verbally, we will find ourselves living in a bipolar world. In Trump’s world, people, nations, institutions and policies are either ‘terrible, ‘huge mistakes’, ‘disastrous’ or ‘strong’, ‘terrific’, ‘the great(est)’. This sounded bad, but made some sense, during the election campaign by painting a shrill contrast between candidate Trump and all the others. But now that he is in office and speaks for all Americans it is no longer acceptable. Is our President so ill-informed and uneducated that he does not know that most of what confronts us is not black or white, not good or bad, but almost always a shade of grey, a mixture of good and bad, the result of some give and take?   He should look in the mirror and see the perfect example. His constituents either adore him, willing to follow him blindly, or vilify him, looking everywhere for an opportunity to disgrace and oust him, if that were possible. But any unbiased observer would come to the conclusion that the 45^th President and his program have severe flaws and solid merits in near equal measure. As a people, collectively, we are just no longer capable of occupying the high, middle, ground.

Words do matter. Just ask president Obama what he would give for being able to rescind his infamous “red line” words when he spoke of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria. To have uttered these words, and then not find it opportune to follow through on them when Assad called his bluff, has irreparably harmed the credibility of the USA in the eyes of the world. As Robert Jervis, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, said in an interview with The Atlantic: “If you make a threat and then appear to have backed away from it, there’s a price to be paid. Your threat is less likely to be believed the next time.”

Words, sharp words that express everything in terms of black or white, good or bad, are a two-edged sword. They can cut both ways and they cause self-inflicted wounds particularly for those who use such words carelessly, impulsively and abundantly. In the case of our 45^th President they are used deliberately, and to his advantage, to keep his followers, the people who got him elected, engaged and motivated. He knows full well that rhetoric is very effective with these folks. They love to be riled up and they want to hear confirmation, all the time, of how bad the people, ideas and institutions are that don’t jive with the populist view of the world. For the red baseball cap wearing crowd, tough, aggressive and politically incorrect language is almost enough to feel vindicated. If it does not gets followed by action or does not achieve the intended purpose, the blame can conveniently be put on adversaries like the media, the establishment, ‘so-called judges’ or the democrats.

But the same sword can as easily turn against you. This danger increases when the words are spoken by someone who righteously will refuse to back down if his words are misinterpreted, refuted or met with disdain. If the statement is ‘I will not allow the Iranians (or the North Koreans) to test-fire any long-distance missiles’ or ‘I will keep the Chinese from placing any missile installations on the artificial islands in the South China Sea’ and the other side fails to comply, you will find yourself backed into the corner from where there is no escape: leaving only two bad choices, to either back down or go to war. The sword will have cut the wrong way.

Yes, words can kill. If words are not used sparingly, diplomatically and wisely, but in a way to provoke war, the killing can reach a scale not seen since World War II and there will be no winners, only losers. Can we trust our 45^th President to use his words not in a manner that appeases his nationalistic populist constituency, but sparingly, diplomatically and wisely?