"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words may never hurt me" The old saying is meant to encourage children to brush off teasing from other children on the playground.
By the time most kids have reached high school they know that the phrase is complete bull sh*t. Words have power in our society. They have the power to hurt feelings, to influence decisions, to change policy, and to start wars.
The power of words increases with the size of the audience and the importance of the subject. Therefore, the words and rhetoric being used in presidential campaigns can have effects that the campaign never expected.
For example, the Planned Parenthood shooting. If you haven't been watching the news, on Nov 27th in Colorado Springs a man named Robert Lewis Dear Jr. opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic. He killed three people and injured nine others. Officials are saying that Dear used the phrase, "no more dead baby parts" after he was apprehended.
The "dead baby parts," also if you haven't been watching the news, comes from a highly edited and deceptive video made by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group. The video insinuates that Planned Parenthood harvests and sells "dead baby parts" for profit. The video has been discussed and made popular by many political candidates, but most prominently by Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina.
This shooting is not the first instance of violence that could be related to the video. Since the video was posted over the summer, there have been four instances of arson and increased threats and harassment at clinics across the country.
The video and the support of the video which uses violent rhetoric (i.e. "dead babies") helps create a culture which condones and possibly encourages violence.
Let's look at Donald Trump. On December 7th, Trump called for "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Previously, he spoke about thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering about the 9/11 attacks. His rhetoric towards the Muslim community increases the already high fear that many Americans have towards the Muslim community as a whole. By generalizing and demonizing all Muslims, Trump contributes to Islamaphobia and, just like "dead babies" contributed to violence towards Planned Parenthood clinics, he could be contributing towards violence/prejudiced/discrimination towards American Muslims.
I know, the idea that political candidates words cause violence is hard to get on board with. I'm not saying the candidates use violent and extreme rhetoric with the intent of bringing about violence. But their sensational way of talking about the issues creates a distorted view of the world. It riles up their supporters and it makes violence an option.
On college campuses, the new way to prevent sexual violence is to combat rape culture. Rape culture being the images, words, and actions that dehumanize women. To put simply, if you call women sluts/bitches/hoes over and over soon people no longer view women as people but as sluts/bitches/hoes. Therefore, it's much easier to harass, assault, rape women if you see them as sluts/bitches/hoes, instead of if you see them as people.
The same logic follows with violent rhetoric in politics. If politicians talk about Muslims as an evil group of people over and over or if anti-abortion groups talk about Planned Parenthood as the creator of "dead babies" over and over then people no longer view Muslims and planned parenthood employees as complex human beings worthy of respect. Instead, people see them as bad, evil, and worth killing.
I'm not trying to infringe the right to free speech, but I am hoping that people see that words have power and that everyone, especially public figures, thinks about the effects their words can have on the lives of others.
