I once had a nightmare in which everybody’s mouth was covered with duct tape, and communication was reduced to hand-held chalkboards (this was before cell phones, of course). After reading about Papa John’s pizza founder John Schnatter resigning from his company because of poor word choice, I wondered if we are truly reaching the point at which what we say, regardless of its volatility, has too high a price?
Of course, my viewpoint is that of somebody who endured countless verbal abuses at key points in my life, so words like “retard” have a sting not unlike the infamous “n-word” which Schnatter supposedly uttered in the alleged context of having heard that KFC’s own Colonel Sanders used it with impunity. Let’s look at that again: he said that he said the word and didn’t get into trouble for it, so the messenger who said he said it got shot.
Are you following me? I’m not: I think I missed a turn somewhere.
As an advocate of eliminating racism, bullying and abuse of all kinds, I don’t like to hear angry verbiage from anybody about anything, but we’re starting to make the very communication of those words into something akin to murder or cannibalism; if we were in the 18th century, putting the Lord’s name next to “damn,” one might be hanged. Imagine if the child in the famous story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” had been unceremoniously thrown off a cliff for verbally pointing out the naked sovereign.
We are not solving any problems by punishing discussions about our past misdeeds with public shunning. Unless our history books are lying about the whole tragedy of slavery and servitude in our country (and we know they are not), we need to talk about what causes the rift between our nation and do something about it. Banning one word from history won’t help solve the problem. And really, one can’t do it. The word is there, and it needs to be dealt with.
We’ve been down this path before, and I’ve said that we probably should redeem the man while punishing the misdeed; otherwise we wind up with more people on the outskirts of society than inside the circle. That’s separation all over again. We are supposed to be bringing our brothers together, instead of sending them away.
So now I don’t know if I can walk into Papa John’s and order a pizza anymore. There are wonderful employees in there who are in danger of losing their jobs without our patronage. They didn’t do anything wrong. But here we are stuck in that “if one, than all” mindset which snubs the group for one person’s errors. At least Schnatter resigned, rather than wait to be shown the door, but the issue still remains, along with all the other anger that seems to be permeating our daily lives lately.
So I’ve written my piece, and I hope nobody expects me to keep my mouth shut with duct tape, because we still have to talk.
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