American Language of Conflict, Violence and Discord

George Carlin

My favorite comedian, George Carlin, once said, "...The words you use say a lot about you." The language that permeates out culture is full of conflict, violence and discord. I think we have always been this way but it has gone off the rails in the last few decades. One of George's bits is when we don't like something we declare war on it:
The War on drugs.
The War on poverty.
The War on obesity.
The War on AIDS.
The War on cancer.
The War on terror. 
...and on an on.
Now, we have a war on facts and a war on reality itself. This does not sound like the language of a peace loving people. Even in sports we find similar war like language.

Teams don't play each other. They go to war, battle and fight! Some of this is to  build TV ratings, sure. But it is normal language. It even shows up in golf. "Tiger and Rory dual in tie breaker!" Football is all about war as George explains here (along with a little on baseball). The language filters down to the high school level if not lower. Acts of sportsmanship are an anomaly in the age of me me me all the time.

We talk about business and economics in the same way. Competition, trade wars, know your enemy, court / legal battles, tactics and strategy. It too filters all the way down from nation-states to coworkers. My coworkers (teammates?) are also my closest competition. As an old friend told me in regards to to the workplace long ago, "...trust no one." The workplace can truly be a jungle. If you a part of a sales force, you know this. Who's on top, who's on the bottom? It all too often feels we are on our own, me versus the world. If I'm lucky, I have "job security." This seems to be getting worse with time. Don't look to politics for answers. Here the language of conflict, violence and discord knows no bounds.

It is now a daily occurrence that our reality denying president insults, lashes out, trades barbs with, dehumanizes and tears down another world leader or group. That's what we get when a so called "TV Reality Star" is allowed to become president. He lost the popular vote. But that's another story. Our two political parties who have too much in common have long ago gave up on serving the people and working together to solve actual problems. Now it is much more like a TV reality /game show than a legislative body doing the work of the people. Insults, finger pointing and entrenched gridlock keep hardly anything (except what the corporate masters want) from getting done.                  

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These are not "bloodless" wars. Consider all the chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football and premature deaths. Now, I'm not sure anyone has died from golf yet. But I hope it gets the point across about language. Business in a capitalist system must have casualties in the form of poverty and spiraling uncertainty. In politics, language can not only lead to physical war but outright genocide as well. The words we choose to use say a lot about us, indeed.