On Expletives and Political Protest

There was a time in my life, more or less in my mid-teens, where I had gotten into the habit of including an expletive in just about every sentence I spoke. I did this partly because my friends were doing it, but largely because like so many teens I had come to believe that everything I said was so important that it needed a four letter word to emphasis just how important it was.

Like many, I eventually realized that if you emphasize everything, you are really emphasizing nothing. And further I came to understand that if you use an expletive in every sentence, there is no way to convey that extra level of emotion or importance when you need to; when you label everything with a superlative or an expletive, then there is no way to convey true importance using words because you have rendered every word you might use impotent.

I think most people understand this, with regards to their personal lives and day to day conversations, but a surprising number of people seem not to understand this in terms of expressing themselves politically.

If there is a politician or political party in power, at any level of government, whose political views are very different than yours then he, she or they are going to make a lot of decisions that you won't like. If you go on public rants about said politician over every issue, and frequently cite the superlatives of political discussion (comparisons to dictators, your country's way of life being destroyed, calls for extreme measures to remove said politician, etc) then what do you do when there is an issue that is even more important than all the other ones?

How can you get the attention of your ambivalent friends and neighbors, when they long ago began tuning you out because you scream bloody murder over everything? How can you tell a politician that this decision really is going too far, when you've already told them that dozens of other decisions they've made have gone too far? How much harder do these problems become when you are not a lone voice who has decried every decision, but one of thousands? How numb will you collectively have made the politician and the public to criticism?

The answer to this is the same for a politically minded person as it is for the swearing teenager. When you have painted yourself into a corner where words can no longer have the meaning you need them to, then your only choice is to take action. If this really is the law that's going to destroy the country, then your only choice is to actually do something about it; there are a lot of ways one can protest, and if a law really is the end of everything, then it shouldn't be hard to find others who will protest with you.