As a matter of fact, words do matter... or don't they?

It was a bright and sunny day.
A woman addressed a crowd.
A man pulled a gun.
The woman fell down, silenced.

Seven others followed. Everyone left standing ran. Some, screaming.

The woman is now in the hospital. The man is now in jail.

The woman now clinging to life is Congresswoman. She can no longer speak. 
The man is a local student... a malcontent, to say the least. He can speak, but refuses.

Soon we learn that the Congresswoman was afraid of being shot. She had good reason: She had been threatened before. Her office had, in fact, been vandalized... recently. With a gun.

She wrote to a colleague, confessed her fears... about divisive political rhetoric - "hate speech"- among peers and constituents. How to curb it? What could be done? 

Who, if anyone, responded? Does it matter?

Meanwhile, a deranged student bought a gun.

What did he say to the dealer who sold him a semi-automatic weapon... one so feared, that it was outlawed in the US... until 2004. Does it matter?

Do words matter?

When I was a kid, a young man, also a student, also a malcontent, offed himself. 
His parents blamed his penchant for Ozzy Osbourne records. 

In the wake of his death, a local pastor staged a bonfire. He called upon parents to burn books, albums and other  materials deemed "offensive to God." 

Parents and elders came. Teen and 'tweens were dragged along. 

I was lucky. My parents thought this behavior was odd, even for religious folk. After all, WE were religious folk. 

My sister had an Ozzy Osbourne record. No one insisted, but... she threw it out anyway.

Curious, I snuck outside. I dug the album out of the trash bin, with the tenacity of a bird dog. 
I looked for the words, the ones behind the fuss. I found them. I hid the record in the garage until morning.

After school the next day, I slipped the contraband out of my bookbag, and showed it to a friend. He also liked Ozzy records.

I pointed out the offending song title: Suicide Solution.  "It's about alcohol..." he said, rather flatly, swirling his index finger around in a circle, as if stirring an imaginary glass. "A warning," he intoned, as only a high school senior can. "If you drink too much of it, you can die."

All that wax, gone to waste.

Can mere words incite violence? Maybe not for the sane...

Words do matter. They mattered greatly in Rwanda, where government radio broadcasts incited genocide, even murder against rival Tutsi "cockroaches."
They mattered when General Dallaire pled to the United Nations leadership for "guidance." And their absence mattered greatly when the UN refused to respond. 

That said... words alone do not kill. People kill. They do not necessarily need guns to do it.

I borrowed the below quote from Robert Edsel's insightful blog post, dated 2009... just 2 weeks after the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

German poet Heinrich Heine said: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbreent man auch am Ende Menschen.” (“This was only foreplay. Where books are being burned there will eventually be humans burned.”)


Of course, the gap between burning books out of fear and ideology and taking human lives is thinner than any of us want to consider. The importance of Heine’s observation is timeless:  they are words of warning to us all…to pay attention…to think for ourselves, and to speak up and act when the very freedoms all people of good will cherish are under attack.

Kinda makes you rethink Mrs. Palin's special brand of political humor, now that a Democratic Congresswoman has ended up in the cross-hairs for real, doesn't it?



One can only hope so.