Author Peggy Rosenthal Speaks Out...
Originally published October 10, 2002
The Baltimore Sun
I am concerned about the public rhetoric leading up to this war and in the war, if it comes. This rhetoric tends to be a less-than-honest use of language. Back in August, one of the president's spokesmen said, "We're going to be presenting our case for the war to the American people, but we're going to wait until September because August is a bad time to introduce a new product." It's very disturbing. ... [The focus] becomes "How do you sell something?" rather than "What is the truth of the situation?"
I think the vocabulary used by the government starting right after Sept. 11 has led us into all kinds of problems. Specifically, defining our response as a "war on terrorism." War brings with it a whole gearing up of the military infrastructure as well as the assumption that the major way of making us safer is through military action.
I would have used the vocabulary of criminal action. The terrorists and the al-Qaida group were criminals, not a nation declaring war on us. Instead of war, our response would then have had a legal framework, of doing what we could to apprehend the group leaders and take them to court. We didn't respond to Timothy McVeigh's act of terrorism by bombing his neighborhood; we took him through the judicial process.
Aside from framing and responding to 9/11 as a criminal action, I think another part of our response should have been [to ask] "Why is it that people of this world hate us so much that they would want to do this terrible deed?" So it would be a response of self-examination as well as pursuit of a legal response both much less inflammatory than war.
We've desensitized ourselves to the violence which is the core meaning of war, partly by using the word as a metaphor for such things as the war on poverty. War basically is the killing of people, and we don't hear much about that.
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Peggy Rosenthal is the author of Words and Values: Some Leading Words and Where They Lead Us and co-director of Poetry Retreat, an organization that encourages people to slow down to pay attention to words.
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