Using the word as a weapon

Pastor Jim Warren instructs on how to use the Word as a Weapon from Matthew 4: 1-11 in the continuation of The Word is Marching On series.  

Pastor Linda Warren opens in prayer and congregant Agnes G. reads the Scripture upon which the initial message preached on Oct. 14, 2018 was based:  Ephesians 6: 10-18.

Lately, I’ve become aware of an increase in the amount of kvetching that surrounds me. Whether online, in private conversation, or in public discourse, people seem eager to express their discontent with one thing or another. Rarely do I hear folks expressing an equal measure of praise or satisfaction for the bounty of people, places, or things that they encounter in their daily lives.

I’m sure you hear the cacophony, too: The weather. Stalled traffic. No Wi-Fi here or there. Taxes. Politicians—Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Party members—pick one or all. Immigrants. Old people. Young folks. Minorities. White people. Dare to mention any of these in friendly conversation and I’ll wager a Happy Meal that someone within earshot will pipe up with an angry analysis, typically in more colorful language than it is appropriate to share here.

Before continuing, let me be clear: I am aware that some of you might accuse me of doing it now, and yes—I’m complaining about complaining. At times like this, maybe I’m as guilty as the next guy. But I pray I’m not like that fellow sitting on the back bench of the bus, railing angrily into his cell phone for the rest of us to hear. Really, dude?

While I’m neither Pollyanna nor an irrepressible optimist, I prefer to hear praise rather than complaint. These days, however, it’s hard to come by. To be sure, anyone in my line of work—sharing an opinion, especially on sensitive topics such as race, multiculturalism, or public policy—invites dissenting points of view. But respectful disagreement or debate isn’t the same thing as an angry diatribe. It’s a pity that fewer people seem to know the difference, and this lack of awareness has serious consequences for the quality of civic life.

In his 1993 book Culture of Complaint, journalist and cultural critic Robert Hughes created something of a sensation by observing that American society was “fraying” as a result of polarized views that nearly everyone seems inclined to share with everyone else. He likened it to a drug, calling ubiquitous outrage the “crack of politics—a short, intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse.”

Photographer and journalist Scott London’s review of Hughes’ work offers some keen insights into the writer’s observation that hostile language has a chilling effect on society’s ability to accommodate differences of opinions, as well as diverse groups of people. As London put it, both liberals and conservatives are guilty:

During the 1960s, liberals tried to label every conservative a fascist. Then during the Reagan years conservatives managed to conflate all government intervention in economics with creeping Marxism. Over the past fifteen years, conservatives have succeeded, virtually unopposed, in depicting as left wing, agendas that, in a saner polity, would be regarded as ideologically neutral. This trend has been only exacerbated by the political correctness movement which has given them ammunition by reducing the pragmatic issues of the day to a war of words.

As is the case in any war, truth becomes a casualty. When words are the weapons of choice, combatants lose a sense of proportion as they fling invectives willy-nilly, scoring debate points in a game for which no one is really keeping score and oblivious to the harm that their venom inflicts on the innocent, larger society.

Last week’s National Prayer Breakfast—where President Barack Obama warned a ballroom full of purportedly pious people that religious zealotry has been misused throughout history, not just contemporaneously by Islamic extremists in the Middle East—provides a case in point. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” the president said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

There should be no debate over this. A cursory understanding of world or U.S. history renders President Obama’s comments res ipsa loquitur. But no! My ThinkProgress colleague Jack Jenkins observed that the president’s “embrace of historical fact infuriated some conservatives, many of whom equated his reference to things such as the Crusades to an attack on Christianity.”

This reaction, of course, was to be expected. The contentious nature of politics ensures predictable, knee-jerk reactions to any idea or policy from the loyal opposition. For the most part, television pundits and social media trolls are in the attention-seeking game, and they employ arguments—however inaccurate—that inflame those inclined to share their outrage. That’s why the comments sections of otherwise legitimate news stories quickly devolve into racist, xenophobic, sexist, or just plain mean-spirited rants.

According to a recent report by Demos, a British think tank, racist and derogatory messages are posted on Twitter at a rate of about 10,000 tweets per day—that’s approximately seven every minute. The study’s most remarkable findings concerned the frequent use of offensive speech. For the most part, the researchers found “very few” instances in which the offensive speech was actually threatening.

“A significant proportion of use cases are what we have termed ‘casual use of racial slurs’, which means the term is being used in a way that might not be employed to intentionally cause offense (or where the user is unaware of the connotations of the term) but may be deemed so by others,” the researchers wrote. “The way in which racist language can seep into broader language use and reflect underlying social attitudes is potentially an area of concern.”

In other words, people cavalierly toss out slurs and abusive speech not with the intent to cause physical harm to anyone but in order to bind themselves into a group-think mentality. As their shared superiority is reinforced through slanderous language, they become a part of the in crowd. This isn’t a good thing—far from it. It’s dangerous because it desensitizes people to the harm created by loose lips.

I do not want to censor anyone. I’m not advocating going as far as the burghers in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, who want to ban negative comments on social media. In a society that values free speech, there’s little to be done, or that should be done, to prevent people from expressing themselves.

But there’s a price to pay for all of this negativity. When people speak their minds, they’re showing their true selves, even under the guise of invisibility that social media fosters. Words really do have meanings, and those meanings represent very real attitudes and beliefs. It’s the cumulative effect of those angry little words that undergirds larger public attitudes and behaviors, which in turn affects the large-scale policies that govern us all.

We should choose them well.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

Many people know that the word not only heals, but also can kill. For example, African sorcerers kill with a word. They say to their fellow tribesman that he will die, and his authority as a sorcerer and the faith of the victim do their job — a person goes, lies down and … dies! However, there is a special science about how to act with the word in someone’s interests. And this science is called (albeit, the Higher Attestation Commission is the Higher Attestation Commission of the Russian Federation, it does not consider it a science) PR, “public relations”, or “public relations”, and today it is taught in the universities of our country.

It must be said that this term itself appeared a long time ago, back in the 1807 year, and PR events were held always and everywhere, almost from the Methuselah times, but the relationship to them was different. For example, in our country the PR was blamed in the USSR. In 1985, the year in Ukraine even defended a Ph.D. thesis on the topic: “PR in the service of American imperialism”, and this despite the fact that it was in the USSR that PR-work reached simply enormous proportions, starting from May Day parades and demonstrations of highly tanned boys and girls in white underpants and t-shirts and before space rocket launches for holiday dates. PR was, and at the same time it was not until the 1989 year. And then it went and went, since 1993, they started teaching him first at MGIMO, then at LETI, then in 1995, at Penza and Tambov State Universities. And then a chain reaction has already begun, so today in Russia we teach PR in more than 100 universities! And experience shows that there are still not enough specialists in this field.

Some people think wrong (and this is a consequence of newspaper propaganda, cursing the PR, and newspaper people scold the PR because their PR people have direct competitors and, in addition, puppeteers) that PR is a universal deception. In fact, deception in PR is a lot of PR-troechnikov, which is full of any specialty. This professional PR professional will never lie, he remembers: “Once you have lied, who will believe you!” That is, he speaks only the truth, or is silent at all … And that’s all, he simply doesn’t have other tools in the sense of verbal communication. Of course, you can play with color, sound, number of movements, there are many tricks on how to “hang noodles on your ears”, but only all this should ideally be done without cheating. This is the true professionalism of the PR man, his skill, and it is precisely for this that he is paid good money.

On some examples of the effective work of PR people today it is quite possible to tell.

All older people remember 1991 year, August and “Swan Lake” on TV screens. And here one PR manager from the provincial town of Ensk decided that by no means could he stay aside from the events taking place in the country. But how to do that? Go to Moscow on the barricades to fight against the Emergency Committee? It is a pity to put the head under the bullets, especially since it is possible and not to substitute. He went around the city: a rally in support of the State Emergency Committee in one square, against another, and they write volunteers to go to Moscow. And then he remembered that there was a telex and fax station in their city that communicates with the whole world. It is now possible to call on a mobile phone at least in Texas, at least in Australia, and then the whole city was the only one fax!

And so he went there, asked: was the connection interrupted? No, not interrupted! And he began sending to his acquaintances (and then already many citizens of the USSR had friends and acquaintances abroad, and among them were research workers and famous professors) messages of the appropriate content: “In the USSR there was an anti-constitutional coup. The president is isolated. Please write to your local and central media that the true patriots of the country demand that Gorbachev be given the opportunity to address the people under international security guarantees. And also demand to freeze Soviet holdings in banks, not to supply medicines, food, spare parts for computers. And to help these people, because if the State Emergency Committee wins, Siberia shines on them! «Yes, and send newspapers with these letters …» for stories».

Then this man called friends in Moscow, they say, how are you? And to him: we have banned the newspaper for release, since her already in circulation in 300000 prints «L’Humanite» in Paris. “I’m not the only one so smart,” the man decided. And then what happened happened. But the letters of his friends were published in many newspapers. Although this “pinprick” did not play a special role, in the general chorus this also sounded. Well, and then the newspapers came to him and … yes, the «masters of the word» excellent there, they beat it! And help came! So with one shot, this “CO specialist” immediately killed two birds with one stone.

During the period of cardinal reforms, this man did not have a relationship with the local communists. Why — it is clear. He himself was a Communist, a propagandist of the UC CPSU, knew the whole «kitchen» from the inside, and it was just disgusting for him to listen to all their appeals after … And then the elections, Zyuganov almost won and … how to intervene in the electoral process? He thought and wrote an article. No, it was not called like the others (“Vote for the Communists — buy food for the last time!” Or “Vote with your heart and mind”). This is because all local newspapers were filled with such articles.

The article was entitled «So that we do not die out like dinosaurs.» It’s impossible to get past such a title, is it? And it said that the scientist Steve Hawking created the theory of time travel, and here in Moscow in one scientific research institute they made the “time machine” “Lovondatr-7” (about which, in its time, wrote the magazine “Technology — Youth”). True, she could not move in time, but time was squeezing — a fact, and if so, then “I think,” the author wrote that “Lovondatr-25” surely will work as it should. And then: if you vote for a commie, then I will go to this research institute, persuade the creators of the car to go into the past, in 1880, when ten-year-old Volodya Ulyanov bathed on the river in the village of Kokushkin, began to sink, but was rescued by some passers-by. So we find out who. And then invite him to drink beer in the nearest pub, and … Volodya will drown! There will be no RSDLP, revolution, and you, dear! Divide the fate of dinosaurs!

The publication made a lot of noise. Some even demanded that the author be held accountable «for the attempt on the life of the leader of the world proletariat.» But nothing came of it, but a certain number of votes were taken away from those who didn’t like the author.
Then, after they also began to train students in the Ensk region, the city fell into the “red belt”. That is, only the “Reds” were elected to the Duma from him, and the consequences of this were corresponding. “We must end this!” — this specialist decided, and before the next elections, the students conducted public opinion research. The question interested only one questioner: “Is it time for Ensku to get out of the red belt?”

A representative sample of the number of citizens (the majority of respondents) replied: “It’s time.” And I must say that before this, five different agencies conducted opinion polls and found out that the majority of residents of Ensk will continue to vote for the Communists. And here is the result? What’s the matter? And the thing is in the knowledge of psychology! For a survey to be credible on 100%, it is necessary to conduct it in groups that are quantitatively proportional to all the social strata of a particular region. And they explained it to the students, and they said yes. But these are students. And about them it is known that: “I believe, I believe every beast, but I see the student and hedgehog to believe!” It is clear that they argued with foaming at the mouth in “sleeping areas” and on the streets, but in fact my friends and acquaintances. That is a certain social group. But how to check? No Besides, people need to be trusted … With a bunch of questionnaires with signatures, this PR man went to the radio. They questioned the reliability of the results, but where is the evidence? “But what about the five firms?” They asked him, and he replied: “And they were bribed for the gold of the party!” And what could be objected to this? And evening news came out with a sensation: «Ensk goes out of the» red belt. » Then the same news spread the local TV, then the newspapers and it started: “You do not believe? Check! ”

What about people? People are always people. Even in the novel of Boleslav Prus “Pharaoh” it was written: “The people are grass — bending under the wind!” Therefore, everything happened further, as it was intended: many, not wanting to be left behind others, voted against one of the candidates from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. As a result, only one Communist passed from Ensk to the Duma, and the residents of the city saw for themselves who was right, and that all five firms that conducted their surveys were either bribed or could not do it.

All these examples, as you can see, are taken from the experience of PR work in a relatively small provincial town. Expenses for them were penny. Now imagine what sensible PR can do — a master of his craft if he is given several million rubles or dollars in his hands?