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“I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.” — Walt Whitman
As I have written before, language is what makes us “human”. It is both our strength and our curse. Nowhere is this more evident than in wars like the ones going on between “Russia” and “Ukraine” and between “Israel” and “Hamas” or “Gaza” or “Palestine” or “Palestinians” (Which is it?)
I sincerely doubt that there is any reliably distinguishing genetic difference between many “Russians” and “Ukrainians” or between many “Jews” and “Palestinian” “Christians” or “Muslims”. Those differences are almost entirely in our brains as we have been taught them. Yet many people commit appallingly cruel acts based on beliefs about such differences.
What can we do about that? We must try to stop such cruelty by using the strength of our human languages to change beliefs in each others’ brains. Are we up to that challenge?
