Complexity

I think that Americans use words differently from one another.

If you've followed my writing for any period of time, you'd know I like to talk about the way we talk about stuff a lot. I think our language accounts for a lot of the misunderstandings about things because it's linked to something greater: culture, the summation of our collective experiences, attitudes, and beliefs.

For example, I couldn't help notice in today's news articles on Iraq that the democrats call their ideas for removing troops from Iraq "troop withdrawal." Now, bear with me - I'm not calling it a good or bad term (just that's what they call it), nor am I asking whether or not we should remove troops. This is not a discussion on that part of morality. What I've noticed is that the way we talk about things tends to show how we feel about them, but it can also confuse other people who think about them differently.

In this instance, the democrats view "withdrawal" as a good thing. "Withdrawal" is such a nice word; it's intentional, but not harsh. It speaks of "we don't need to be here anymore." It's gentle, simple, elegant, clean.

Until you say the word "withdrawal" to a conservative republican. "Withdrawal" doesn't mean the same thing to a republican; in his mind, "withdrawal" is the equivalent of "retreat," which essentially means "they beat us." It's a bad thing. I'm speaking in broad, sweeping generalizations of course, because obviously not every republican thinks this way, nor does every democrat mean something so benign. It's an over-simplification (mostly) to make a point: how we say stuff matters.

So the democrats started using another word, "redeployment." A word many republicans don't mind so much; it too is benign, because it doesn't have the same imperative "we're leaving now" feel to it that "withdrawal" does; it's not a retreat, more like a shuffling of the deck. I think the republican agenda was like that to begin with, but somewhere over time it got lost when they discovered that 'fixing' things in Iraq was going to take a lot more time and effort than they could manage. And lots of Americans don't like the idea of staying anymore.

Another great example of the language differences, the words "a long time" mean something very different to different people. I was just reading this news article about the troop redeployment and the title says "U.S. Commander in Iraq Sees Long Commitment." Now, when I saw the title my first reaction was "well ya think?" (I believe it'll take several generations to make the middle east into at least a semblence of non-violence, and peace another few generations). Imagine my surprise then, when I read this statement from the middle: "If you’re going to achieve the kinds of effects that we probably need, that it would need to be sustained certainly for some time well beyond the summer."

The summer?

"A long time" to me (at least, in this context) is decades, not a summer. But that's not what he meant when he said a long time. If he hadn't clarified his definition, I would've been left thinking "oh, I guess this thing is far from over" and would've been even more confused when the troops are suddenly withdrawn from Iraq long before I expected an end.

Our language matters.

This is why I try to get my news from a variety of sources, liberal and conservative. If it's possible, I try to get the same story from three or four different places, but for some things it doesn't always happen.

Anyway, I went to a talk today by a guy named Omar. He's half-Iraqi and half-Texan. How this combination happened, I do not know, but suffice it to say he's a really nice guy. He talked about the differences between his family in Iraq/Jordan/Amman and in the USA. He said that most conservatives that's he's met (and many liberals as well) tend to think "Arab = Muslim = Terrorist." If that's true, he's half-terrorist. He said that if you think like that, then from the Arab's perspective it's "American = Christian = KKK member."

Which is obviously not so.

The language we choose matters.

Statistics, for example, are notably easy to manipulate. I can make them say anything I want to by giving certain information but leaving out certain other information, leaving the reader's own prejudices and assumptions to fill in the blanks. What I choose to say matters, but also what I choose NOT to say (in other words, what I choose to omit). If, in an article about the toll of the war, I say "3000 people died in Iraq since 2006!" it begs all sorts of questions; which people? Americans? Iraqis? Both? And then, how does that compare to other wars? How did they die? Statistics are not really reliable unless you qualify them with descriptions of where and how you got the information.

My biggest problem with the press as it retells the story of the war in Iraq is that they tend to focus on only one part of the picture. Some press tell about the death toll of American soldiers without mentioning how many Iraqis die daily. Some press talk about the cost of the war to our budget, neglecting to mention the many sorts of cost - namely, the lives of the people over there, both American and Iraqi. Some press rant about how many civilians Americans 'brutally' (yet often accidentally) kill and how we should then pull out, neglecting to mention the many car bombs specifically targeting Iraqi civilians because they're a different religion or even a different brand of muslim than the assailants.

The story is never - EVER - simple. There are many complex sides to an issue that we must always consider, and making broad, sweeping generalizations about something is rarely, if ever, a good idea.

I am the king of broad, sweeping generalizations; trust me, I'm learning this the hard way.

I've been learning this about global warming. At one point, I said that I didn't believe that global warming was happening. I did some reading, had a few conversations, discovered that ok, there's plenty of scientific evidence to say that the world's average temperatures are climbing. Whether this is faster or slower is debatable, mind you, but temperatures are definitely climbing. I was surprised, but ok, I can accept that. Then I wondered, "what is the cause?"

So I read statistics about human pollution and SUVs from all the Greens, and then I read statistics about natural processes like volcanic eruptions and the rise in Mars' average temperatures and Al Gore's house from the conservatives, and I came to a realization: it's not really one thing. It's never JUST one thing. We might like to generalize and SAY that it's one thing, but it's not. It's EASIER to say it's one thing and blame it on one thing, but unfortunately for our peace of mind, there are ALWAYS multiple causes for any given situation, any number of causal chains that led to a specific occurance.

To say that it's all one person's fault or all one demographic's fault or even all of one species' fault is entirely wrong. To what degree each element effects the outcome is something we can debate another time, but that's not the point: the point is, let's try to understand the whole picture before we go placing blame or rush into rash actions that will have huge impact on everybody. We've been given this planet to look after, our fellow men and women to look after; we need to honor that responsibility for its complexity.