Civil Rights Deja Vu?

The CNN article here talks about how the violent rheotric that many politicians and activists use today has been used before. For Hayden, she saw it used in 1964, around the time that three men that worked with her in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee disappeared and were found dead after a forty-four day search.

Why haven’t political leaders, or leaders of any organization, realized that the words and tone of their speeches have affects deeper than just conveying a shallow meaning? Rhetoric has persuaded whole countries to commit violence; I has persuaded one person to commit violence. It happens again and again, and yet the violent nature of the speeches has not ceased.

The shooting in Arizona was one of the most recent effects of this, but it certainly wasn’t the first and it most likely won’t be the last.

During the civil rights movement, as described in the article, people were called un-American and beaten for it. In the pro-choice and pro-life movement today, Dr. Tiller was called Tiller the Killer and was eventually shot in church.

Maybe the words aren’t literally violent, creating pain and destruction, but they give others the ideas to create it, the reasons. Words can create actions and the leaders should practice care with those easily misconstrued words.