The Syntax of Peace; the Idiom of Justice
A M O N G the many wise things Barrack Obama says here about the catastrophe in Gaza—the space he makes for compassion for all humans on both sides of this entrenched conflict, for the plight, in particular, of Palestinians, twice or thrice displaced since 1945; the unmitigated condemnation of the atrocity Hamas committed; the acknowledgment of the right of Jews to a homeland in a place where they have a long historical connection; the appeal he makes to Israel to begin to exercise restraint, humanity and wisdom in its response, or else damage its moral standing (already it has killed in this conflict far more Gazan innocents than Hamas killed Jewish innocents, and ongoing airstrikes have more the feel of vengeance than self-defence about them) and endanger its security and the security of the region; his observation that to speak for Palestinian rights is neither to apologise for Hamas nor to trade in anti-Semitism—I want to touch on how he concludes.
I have often written (beginning in The Little Red Writing Book) that how we choose to speak and write makes a radical difference for good or for ill—for each of us and all of us, at the personal level and at the global. We are about as well as our language lets us be. We suffer the ills our language suffers; bad language retraumatises all who use and all who encounter it (traumatise already by the harshness, bluntness, poverty, and inhumanity of much of the language they’ve grwon and schooled in). Language is vibrational and therefore way more powerful than it seems—rhythm being the most potent force on earth. I have noted, as Obama does, that these are rancorous times, when few seem to recall how to communicate with kindness and clarity and care about what they care about. We enmify, we overstate, we rant. Think about this: How you speak is who you are. So who do you want to be? How would you phrase things if how you phrased things embodied the values you’d like to prevail in the future you imagine? How would you like to be remembered when the heat goes out of a moment—and will the words you use now represent you well down the line?
“Be the change you would see in the world,” said Gandhi. Speak the change you would see in the world, I’d add.
Read all of what Obama has written here. His words serve us all well. They help. Or might if enough of us still the shrillness a while. But listen to this, in particular, and let it help you through this moment and many hard moments to come: “But if we care about keeping open the possibility of peace, security and dignity for future generations of Israeli and Palestinian children—as well as for our own children—then it falls upon all of us to at least make the effort to model, in our own words and actions, the kind of world we want them to inherit.”
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-statement-on-israel-and-gaza-a6c397f09a30
