Sticks And Stones…Or Permanent Victimhood?

When I was ten years old, riding the bus to day camp, one of the other boys called me a “stinkpot.”

A few years later, when I was a pint-sized ninth grader, one of the big twelfth graders spat on me on a high school stairwell.

He nailed the top of my head.

Perfect shot.

Do these incidents make me a “hate crime survivor?”

Or to be precise, the survivor of two hate crimes?

You can make the case that they weren’t hate crimes, they were just “boys being boys.”

I ask because language matters, and this morning, on NPR, a reporter was referring to a victim, in plangent tones, as a “hate crime survivor.”

To be fair, I didn’t catch the specific hate crime the victim survived, so I couldn’t tell you where on the spectrum it fell from, let’s say, ethnic name calling to an act of violence.

Here’s my problem.

When you teach people to define themselves as survivors of an incident, you are teaching them, on some level, to see themselves as victims.

Today, much of what is taught on college campuses having to do with race and the concept of intersectionality is all about asking people to define themselves in terms of their victimhood.

We are not teaching our young people to appreciate the freedom they have as Americans, the fact that they live in a democracy which Winston Churchill called the “least worst” system of governance, or any of the other myriad blessings we enjoy on a day-to-day basis.

No, forget all of that.

You are a victim.

You are a victim of something, and therefore somebody has to pay for it.

I freely admit that we live in a society of often terrible injustice, but that’s because we live on a planet of terrible injustice, and our least worst form of self-governance, democracy, has not managed to outlaw crimes against persons, racist attitudes, or other civil and criminal wrongs.

At the same time, we have to be extremely careful about the language we use with which to describe incidents that befall us.

I’m particularly concerned about the use of the words survivor and denier.

Where I come from, those words have one primary meaning, and that is in connection with the Nazi Holocaust.

The people who went through that era are victims, survivors, or, in some cases, victims and survivors.

The people who deny the Holocaust are, in my humble opinion, almost as bad as the Nazi perpetrators themselves.

When you call someone a hate crime survivor, aren’t you inviting that person to define himself or herself in terms of that unfortunate event, presumably for the rest of their lives, as opposed to inviting them to find a way to work through what they went through, and then move on?

Now let’s talk about deniers.

The word denier these days comes up most often with regard to climate change.

If you don’t believe the mainstream beliefs about man’s role in climate change, you are a “climate change denier,” a phrase redolent of the term “Holocaust denier.”

Words have meaning and importance.

A lot of people, myself included, legitimately question the role of man in the process of the heating, or yes, the cooling of the planet.

Cooling?

Back in my beloved 1970s, the major concern among scientists was that the world was actually cooling, and that we were headed for a deep freeze by the early 21st century.

If you don’t believe me, Google global cooling 1970s and see what you get.

A lot of people, myself among them, believe that the politicization of the science around climate change is all about creating transfers of wealth from the individual to the government and from rich countries to poor ones.

If that’s what your politics call for, fine.

Vote for politicians who share your views.

It’s the American way.

But don’t call people like me, who don’t share your views, a term that has clear overtones of Holocaust denial.

When I was ten, my grandfather was murdered, strangled to death in a Mob hit.

He was a diamond dealer, and somebody told somebody in the Mob, that when he travelled, he carried a large amount of diamonds on him.

He was murdered for his diamonds.

Does this make me a second-generation hate crime survivor?

Should I have lived the last 52 years in a state of abject victimhood?

Words have meaning.

If you’re going to call someone a survivor, you’d better make damn sure that person went through someone as least as serious as what the people who escaped the Nazi Holocaust went through.

And if you’re going to disagree with someone, don’t place that person in the same category, linguistically, as a Nazi.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words matter.

Training a generation to see themselves as victims?

Training them to see people who disagree with them as not just misguided or wrong, but evil?

That’s just really unfortunate.

And there’s no denying that.