September 15, 2019
Dear editor;
What this country needs is not a good 5¢ cigar, but rather, an effective laundry detergent to clean up its political verbiage. Many of our words are so soiled by moral presuppositions, that they are nearly unfit to be heard in the presence of children.
When words are bathed in a binary morality, of which America has a surplus, our vocabularies become weapons of internecine war.
Politics then is reduced to that good-old-fashioned billing of: “Capitalist Dog” versus “Godless Communist” or something less diametrically opposed.
In our dualistic morality, for each good term, an opposite bad term is assumed. What is not true is false. What-is not right is wrong.
Thus, there can be only one right solution; the one allowed by the prejudice of a fixed vocabulary.
To move ahead, our politics must be freed from this captivity.
Science does not begin with the assumption that some solutions are evil. In like manner, we ought to approach political problems with some degree of moral neutrality. We need to confront problems with good faith in democracy and lay off extreme alternative solutions.
Individuals and their words are not the enemy. The moral stigmatizing of them is the problem. May we use words as instruments toward solving problems, not as weapons?
Does anyone have some moral cleansing soap? A dab of American pragmatism might help to soften the verbal texture.
Eugene P. Clemens, Professor, emeritus, Elizabethtown College (Pa.)