WORDS MATTER

I recently visited my daughter in Berlin. Having grown up during the Cold War (McCarthy Era, translated by an 8-year-old as “there’s a communist under every bed”), I was especially intrigued by the Berlin Wall that once completely encircled West Berlin. In its original state, the Wall was 155 kilometers long (96 miles), 4 meters tall (13 feet), and actually consisted of two parallel walls, with a strip of land between them known as the “death strip”--from 1961 to 1989, 140 people were shot by guards trying to get over the wall. Shortly after the border between East and West Germany was officially declared open on November 9, 1989, a group of young people climbed onto the wall. The border patrol at first sprayed one of them with water, but no guns were discharged. In due course, these young Berliners, on their own initiative, tore down the wall, transforming it into a colorful ruin of cement pieces of all shapes and sizes.

Parts of the wall have been preserved. The longest surviving section is the nearly-mile-long open-air East Side Gallery in Friedrichshain along the Spree River where, in 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries were invited to paint murals. What an amazing sight it is in its diverse imagery and messaging.

One mural reads: 

Viele kleine leute die in vielen kleinen orten viele kleine dinge tun, können das gesicht der welt verändern.

Many small people who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world. 

In just a few words, I thought, this artist has captured so much meaning, so much heart, at the epicenter of a structure that for nearly 3 decades stood as a stark symbol of our fragmented world. In essence, people matter.

And words matter.

 Here are just a few words that encapsulate our current struggles in the US, highlighting our own dark and ongoing history of racism, inequality, and violence:

                                    Black Lives Matter.

This phrase—also readily identified as BLM—has galvanized people throughout the US and beyond our borders to protest against police brutality and violence against people of color, especially Black men. But change just one word: 

                                    All lives matter.

 Now the meaning is completely altered. Yes, “all lives matter,” but by changing Black to all, one is essentially trivializing all that BLM embodies—the acknowledgement of our 400+-year history of White supremacy, slavery, and our continuing failure to recognize that Blacks and all people of color are as much God’s creation as any Caucasian or European descendant.

Words matters. 

 My swim coach says that when we swim the butterfly (the most difficult stroke—met with audible groans when it’s part of a set), “we have to embrace all that the water has given you–physical health, mental health.”  

 Similarly, when we write, we should love our language—thinking of all the beauty and power that it has given us and has placed in our hands. 

When we write, let’s embrace our language, respect it, learn it well, and write with passion, conviction, and care, knowing that what we write has the potential to change a life, a society, a world, in a powerful way or even in an incremental way. This is true whether we’re writing a paper, a journal or newspaper article, a dissertation or thesis, or a letter to the editor, to a friend, to a colleague, or to a Senator. What we write and how we write matters.