A famous family story:

My mother, a WWII girl born in 1923, was a rebellious sort. She and some of her wilder friends from Huntington College, a small Methodist school in Montgomery, Alabama, took a trip to New York City during their Christmas vacation. According to my mother, the inclement weather was such that the trains couldn’t return south; the girls got snowed in, were delayed a few days from the beginning of the Winter semester, and had the time of their lives. 

During that extended yet brief visit, my mom fell in love and became engaged to a Roman Catholic (gasp!), a New Yorker (double-gasp!), and an officer in The Army Air Corps. 

For a brief time, my mother’s left hand bore a modest engagement ring. She began the catechumenical steps to becoming a member of the Roman Catholic Church.  

Then, my mother’s fiancé was killed in action.

As my grandmother told the story to me, the fallen soldier’s parents who had become attached to my mom, traveled to her home in Covington, Georgia to embrace and grieve with her. My grandmother spoke about this couple warmly, even bestowing upon them her trademark phrase of approval, “lovely people.”

My great-grandmother who also lived in the house, whose family farm had been pillaged by Sherman’s troops as they marched to the sea during The Civil War a few years before she was born, refused to come out of her room during the bereaved couple’s visit with their would-be daughter-in-law. After the second day, my great-grandmother spitefully shouted downstairs to my grandmother for all to hear, “Sallie Mae, when are those damn Yankees leaving this house?!”

My great-grandmother’s soul was crippled by unrelenting seething hatred her entire life. 

War does that.

   •  •  •

I’m not going to dwell here on the whys and wherefores and the who-done-what-to-whos of the war in Gaza. The turmoil in the region brought by enmity and occupation has been stewing there for a long time.

And this war involves a chafe of religious faiths, a condition that condones people outside the region of conflict to choose sides. Sometimes to violent ends.

During such a war, when children are killed – or emerge from the rubble of their homes and hospitals only to starve to death, there is always a group of people who say virulent stuff like, “Well, those kids would just grow up to be terrorists.”

That’s a guaranteed formula, isn’t it? If you want a generation of children to grow up to hate you, bomb them.

The great Georgia essayist, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.”

Violence begetting violence begetting violence.

Pondering all of this, and again pondering about babies, children, and non-combatants besieged and ensnared in harm’s way…well, this is why American politicians need to stop and think — and even pray — before they speak, before they spout off hate-filled soundbite quips like, “level the place.”

Spouting Off

Words are important. Constitutions, declarations of war, treaties, and scripture are all made of words. The pen is mightier than the sword of course, but I would argue, in this moment of our history, that the pencil might be even mightier than the pen — the pencil has an eraser. The eraser is a tool that can retract words written in anger and haste and without forethought. An eraser is a tool for rescuing the wise and circumspect. 

Ah, but the enemy of circumspection is the ubiquitous microphone, instantly at the ready to collect whatever words are spouted off and spewed forth. Combining the microphone with a twenty-four-hour news cycle gives pundits and statespersons — people not exactly known for their comfort with silence — ample opportunity to spout off.

Just as the over-printing of currency brings down its value, when leaders spout off, the value of words is reduced. And a society in which the value of words is reduced is a society that suffers from a diminishment of true listening, clear thinking, good judgment, empathy, and goodness itself.

I know that the ongoing work of bringing solutions to war-torn lands is multi-layered and complicated. But maybe – just maybe – a tiny reduction of “violent begets” can begin with our words.

I truly believe…

Good words — spoken and carefully heard — can condition us to become stronger and better trees known by our good fruit. 

Andy Offutt Irwin is a humorist, songwriter, and storyteller who lives in Covington, Georgia.