Words hold tremendous power, and if we don't reclaim our language and start seeing people instead of 'militants,' drone victims instead of 'bug splats,' or natural splendor instead of 'green infrastructure,' then the voiceless are destined to be silenced forever.
Interpretation
Language shapes our perception of reality, and mislabeling dehumanizes individuals and experiences.
In this quote, Abby Martin emphasizes the importance of language in shaping our understanding of the world. By urging us to move beyond dehumanizing labels like 'militants' and 'bug splats,' she highlights how such terminology can strip individuals of their humanity and reduce complex situations to mere abstractions. Reclaiming our language means acknowledging the dignity of all individuals and the richness of nature, advocating for a more compassionate and aware discourse that prevents the silencing of the marginalized.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of compassion in journalism.
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
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