Sticks and stones…we’re all heard it, felt it, said it, and probably even accepted it even though suspecting it’s not as true as we wished. If I am the one taunted for being fat or poor or weak or dark skinned, I know dawned well that those words hurt and that I will have to live with the hurt.
Yes, sticks and stones may break my bones, but experience insists that names can and do hurt. As children and as adults we know that, even when we declare otherwise. We need only to listen to national news to verify.
A country, ours, codifies its beliefs by laws argued out, formed, and made permanent by words.
While we watched?
We carry the memory, the morning news showing airplanes slowly flying into the tall New York buildings, a sight we couldn’t believe at first but had to as hour after hour, day after day, week after week the buildings fell: smoke, bodies falling, rubble, people running, screams, anger. It happened.
We bent but we did not break. Eventually the horror lessened, the areas were cleaned, the number of dead tallied, and we determined to remember and dedicate new courage.
Today if we were to take those months and years, rewind them in speed slow enough to last two years and four months, we could see this beautiful experiment of democracy under attack and falling around us again. Not airplanes and bullets but lies, misrepresentations, misuse of law, name calling.
Marie Howard