Speak, Speak My Friend….
Another morning. A few days ago, a sixty-four year old guy mowed down over fifty and wounded many more after careful preparation. This took place in Las Vegas, our city of excess. Several undeclared wars, Iraq and Afghanistan continue to simmer, producing a daily quotient of dead and maimed. Additional conflagrations are verbally threatened, North Korea, Iran. Puerto Rico remains wrecked by a climate change-supercharged hurricane…. Shall you and I be bludgeoned to silence?
Language has been so misused that we fear and mistrust it. We do not mind playing with words, manipulating them, but when the game gets serious we lose courage. And we lose courage for the silliest possible reason: our inborn natural sense of the logos, our love for reasonable expression, our healthy delight in it, shames us with a false sense of guilt. We are drawn to the logos with a strong and noble attraction, but at the same time held back by unnatural fear: the more earnestly we hope to tell the truth, the more secretly we are convinced that we will only add another lie to all the others told by our contemporaries.
We doubt our words because we doubt our very selves–and woe to us if we do not doubt our words and ourselves.
….Nevertheless, we must risk falsity, we must take courage and speak, we must use noble instruments of which we have become ashamed because we not longer trust ourselves to use them worthily. We must dare to think what we mean, and simply make clear statement of what we intend.
….Shall I say that if we fail we shall have an earthly hell, and be completely wiped out or doomed to a future of psychopathic horror in the new barbarism that must emerge from the ruins we have brought down upon our own heads?
–excerpt from Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
