The Collateral Damage of Words

As my “Rules for Reading and Responding” might indicate, I have a problem with the way many things are debated in our country. I don’t want to get in the middle of the fray of the current debate over whether or not the language used by some politicians during the Health Care debate was too inflammatory and intemperate, except to seize on an unfortunate comment made by a blogger. Tom Perriello represents a neighboring district in the House of Representatives. A propane line was cut at his brother’s house, probably because a blogger mistakenly advertised the address as Rep. Perriello’s, and urged those who were upset at his Health Care vote to “drop by.”

I won’t give the blogger’s name because he later apologized both for this blog and for his next one which was even worse. After hearing about the cut propane line, he responded by posting: “Do you mean I posted his brother's address on my Facebook? Oh well, collateral damage."

Again, the blogger has apologized and others are doing a good job of taking him to task for posting the way he did. The phrase I want to focus upon is “collateral damage.”

Words do matter, and “collateral damage” does result when people with influence resort to name calling, caricaturing, ad homonym attacks (attacking the person over the position) to develop an Us vs Then/ Good vs Evil/ world in which there must be victory without compromise. We see it happen among those who govern and among commentators who earn their living talking about those who govern (though sometimes I’m confused as to who is commenting and who is governing). Gossip and sarcasm is all that much of this talk really is, and yet the rhetoric is condoned when used in the service of power. It is ends-justifies-the-means rhetoric that violates all the classic rules of civil discourse.

The collateral damage is that when church or political leaders become hostile in speech that is unfair and even untruthful, while they may energize the most zealous of their followers, they leave many disillusioned by the cynical nature of the whole enterprise. This can be particularly true of young people who realize they have been hurt, or who realize they have been led to hurt others, by the arguments of those they end up seeing being the voices of interests that…, well…, are not serving their best interest.

My next blog will be about how I think that violent rhetoric has become worse since 9/11. Still, the use of words to incite is not new. In fact, the demonization of other leaders and nations, and the twisting and fabrication of facts in order to incite the masses, has been a common tactic to lead nations into wars so as to advance the agendas of certain powers. This led the general Carl von Clausewitz to astutely define war as “the continuation of politics by different means.”

Consider this: When debate becomes violent as political powers seek to win at all costs, politics then becomes war by a different means.