In every blaring day of the news cycle we have become captives of a language that is degraded, dishonest, coarse and brutalized, laced with lies, vengeance and vulgarity. The president of our country is destroying language in the same way he destroys lives.

When indigenous children were kidnapped and sent away from their families, officials at their schools took away their language, knowing that this would change them and, in time, destroy their culture.

We are being changed, here and now, through a language that doesn’t care about others, toward a state of being when we must continually question what’s true and what’s a lie. What are we to say to our children and grandchildren when they hear their president speaking like a thug?

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Toni Morrison said, “Language, in becoming the possession of the people, becomes the possession of the culture, and it is this possession by the people that makes language sublime. We, the people, are language. We own it. We are responsible for it.”

We can choose to use language disgracefully, or as a way to capture the immensity and beauty of our existence. All we can hope for is that enough of us will recognize what’s happening, be heartbroken, resist with all our minds and hearts and speak with our own version of grace, good will and old-fashioned honor.

Eleanor Morse
Peaks Island