The Long Way Home 8.23.24

I may have too much time on my hands, what with spending hours at boat landings with limited cell phone service and sometimes few watercraft to occupy my attention. My mind wanders to overused words that have multiple meanings and the effects those different meanings have on our society.

While overused words may seem harmless, they actually have a significant impact on our perceptions of our neighbors. 

One that bugs me is the word fun. “Let’s do something fun.” “Did you have fun?” “What did you do for fun, on your day off, vacation, weekend, whatever?”  Or when you’re injured or ill, “I bet that wasn’t fun.” 

Fun is sometimes a helpful word, but it is overused. I hear it too much, even from my own mouth. I don’t have to do something fun to enjoy my day. 

Another overused word is battle. “He lost his battle with cancer.” “They were battling the City Council to get a liquor license.” “Every day is an uphill battle.” 

Diseases don’t always require a combative approach. The focus on battle overshadows the real challenges faced by patients. Petitioning government is a right, not a battle. Daily life is often a struggle, but who are you battling?”

Journey is another that wears me out. My dislike of it goes back decades when I first heard that a business had adopted “Enjoy the Journey” as its mission statement. 

What does that mean for a business and, more importantly, its customers? Maybe “Enjoy the Journey” works when you see someone off at the train station. Not as a mission.

Then there are those overused words that are more than annoying.

Words like 'liberal' and 'conservative' are tossed around so often that they've lost their true meaning. It's time we strive for a more balanced and nuanced understanding of these political terms. 

One dictionary defines a liberal as “a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.” 

A conservative is “a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values, favoring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas.”

These two philosophies have more in common than current political eruptions suggest. 

Likewise, we have socialism. Almost 200 years old, socialism refers to a system of social organization in which private property and income distribution are subject to social control. 

Socialism was a scary word when I was growing up. My Great Depression and WWII-era parents feared the worst. They lived through a war instigated by a narcissistic Austrian who took over the government of  Germany with a party called NAZI ( National Socialist German Workers' Party). After that war, we entered a cold war with the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). 

My mother watched newsreels showing long, slow-moving lines of Russian people, mostly women, lined up on the cold streets of Moscow to buy bread in stores dominated by empty shelves. Without a doubt, communism did not spur effective consumer markets in the USSR. But Mom was frightened to death about socialists, who were our enemy, taking over, and she’d face long lines at our nearby supermarket.

It's time to move past the historical fears and misconceptions about words like 'socialist' and 'communist '. These terms belong in the dustbin of history, with zoot suit, beatnik, and hippy. China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea are about the only countries today that identify as communist, and we do business with most of them. 

Ours is a country with a mixed economy, incorporating elements of socialism and capitalism. Although capitalism dominates, we have public education, public-built roads, bridges and airports, public fire departments, police forces, and Medicare and Social Security. What’s to fear there?

According to the US Census Bureau, half of the people in Cook and Lake County have annual incomes below the median of about $40,000. If we lift that half of our population, most of the life challenges the Arrowhead region faces today could be overcome. Now, that’s a journey with many battles to be won, but wouldn’t it be fun?

Most people that I know claim to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. A bumper sticker for all of us, “Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative, Fun.”