The world is collapsing around our ears. Sophistry is to blame. Words are being neutered till they bang our eardrums without effect. To help restore clarity to speech, I offer a fundamental communication rule: Talk straight. Mincing words ultimately is dishonest and injurious to truth. It is conversational cowardice.
Straight talk. Consider a current topic of public yammering … Jews.
For a very very long time, Jews have been reviled and admired, accorded many honors and murdered en masse, praised and gassed, “chosen” and targeted. As Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “Everyone knows we’re chosen, someday I hope we are chosen for good things.” The courageous adolescent was being smart-alecky, of course, but being Jewish can be a trial.
Consider the current Jewish dilemma, which is the fight to stay alive in Israel where the UN subdivided British colonial Palestine and settled Jewish Holocaust survivors after the Nazi nightmare. Surrounding Arab states never liked the deal. Things erupted again in October 2023 when Hamas soldiers invaded Israel, viciously killed 1,200 Jews, took 250 hostages and gleefully shared with family members their bloody accomplishment.
What to make of this? Some public speakers assured listeners that the Jews were to blame and, in fact, had it coming. They said the real victims were Gazans subsequently caught in the crossfire.
A straight-talk response: Who attacked whom? A debilitating weakness of modern conversation is the rhetorical penchant to make everything relative. The sky is blue today—"Not as blue as it would be if we had more solar panels!” Melania Trump is pretty—“No, she is privileged!” Actually, the sky is vibrantly blue and the First Lady is pretty.
Here is another fact: In October 2023, some bad guys entered Israel and killed some good guys (and babies and women). Bad guys did it. When a woman jogger is raped, the rapist is a bad guy, right? That’s true regardless of his immigration status, color of skin, or economic quintile. If you prefer, you can say “a bad guy” is “a good guy doing bad things”—all God’s chilluns being sinners. Yet at the end of the day, his badness needs to be behind bars. Killers need to be repulsed, too.
Another fact: History, scripture, and general experience do not support the notion that all Jews are bad guys. Regardless of what ignorant Hamas soldiers, smug Harvard professors or TV’s smooth-talking-heads declare, it ain’t so. Jews can be rude and ugly, you betcha! Cruel and cliquey. Heck, yow! Heartless and hurtful. In other words, they can act just like some Christians I’ve known across the years. They’re flawed people, those Jews, but not genetically evil.
So, straight talk. You want to score in conversation? Here’s how: Have the courage to call bad guys bad and good guys good. Have the temerity to say, to cite another current topic, that a Tesla is a sweet-running car without adding a Musk epithet. You can speak unadulterated truth. You remember how. You learned it in grade school.
It's ridiculous to offer a clear fact and have the recipient amend it to reflect their latest "political" view! Honest debate seems to have become a thing of the past.