February Blog Post

“The words of public figures, as well as symbols of citizenship, possess the power to lead, reflect, inspire, praise, unite, confront, provoke and entertain.”  This is the sentence that stood out to me most in this weeks reading titled “Rhetoric as Symbolic Action.” Many times I’ve heard people tell other people not to get offended about someone’s words. “Oh don’t be so sensitive” is a common phrase when someone takes offense to something someone else says. In the past presidential election there was a lot of language used that offended me as a woman, and offended many other people for several different reasons. So many people thought that taking offense to these words was somehow weak, or being sensitive. But to me, they are so much more than words, especially when a President or a public figure is speaking them. When Donald Trump accused Mexicans of all being rapists/criminals, he wasn’t just making a racist comment. He was making a movement in which it became okay to think or say that and call it politics. When a powerful figure speaks, their words become more than just language. Martin Luther King Jr. said many influential things in his life, and his words became a movement, they became passion, and they became his legacy. His words called others to action and made others aware of the issues at hand and his words unified a movement. Or what about Hitler. His words created a movement and a legacy, but for evil. His words dehumanized an entire race and had damage that reached far beyond just words. So that’s why it’s perfectly okay to be offended by words, because when those words are being spoken by someone with potential power, they can turn into something far greater. I went three years in a high school listening to rednecks make bad comments about women, and it was offensive, but never frightening. Because I knew that everyone else thought that these rednecks were dumb and they would never have an audience bigger than all their logging buddies and I could rise above what they were saying. But when someone like a very popular presidential candidate says something, it becomes scary because you know that he’s going to have a million people who agree just because of who he is. Words are not just words, especially when spoken by those in power. I think the reason this sentence stuck out to me is because it confirmed a previous belief that I already had about the power of public figures and words. The power of words is already in the hands of public figures, and I think because of that it is perfectly okay to find things they say offensive and call them out. There is no such thing as “overly sensitive” when we know the power of words.