Bio: Will Shonbrun wrote and published the Sonoma Valley Voice newsletter (1995- 2002. He co-published the North Bay Progressive newspaper in Santa Rosa from 2000 - 2005. He’s published two novels and has lived in Sonoma County for 40 years.
Watch your language
It’s an interesting but not unusual turn of events that Ken Mattson, labeled a “real estate mogul” by the Press Democrat, has been found to be nothing more than a common thief. Like Donald Trump, also a thief, both have taken money from people through cheating, lying and conning them. These characters gain people’s trust through deception, and then pick their pockets and steal what does not rightfully belong to them. This is thievery, whether it’s robbing with a gun or cheating someone through subterfuge to line one’s own pocket, and it should be labeled and called and understood for what it is. Frankly, I’ve got more respect for a mugger than for a worthless weasel like Mattson or Trump.
When someone takes something that does not rightfully belong to them, be it material goods, money or intellectual property, it is thievery, plain and simple, and it should be labeled as such. Another example of incorrect or misleading language is the labeling of people who are living unsheltered on city streets. We call these people “the homeless,” when in fact what these people are is unfortunate individuals who do not have the means to buy or rent housing for themselves, or their families, due to myriad causes, including drug addiction, mental health disabilities or inability to find a job. These are only three of the many contributing factors leading to unhoused residents. It is estimated there are anywhere from 600,000 to 700,000 people in the United States living on our streets without any shelter or physical protection from the elements, and these numbers have been increasing every year for decades.
A further example of a debasing use of language is categorizing people from other countries seeking to come to the U.S. as “illegal aliens” a pejorative title unfairly attached to desperate people driven to leave their homelands in order to survive.
Once again the tendency is to label and categorize individual human beings, each with distinct lives, needs, and wants into faceless groups or herds of something other than individual human beings, and as nothing more than a problem to be dealt with by the rest of society. When language robs individual beings of their value and calls them animals, as if animals are not sentient beings that also require respect and kindness in their treatment, we have labeled them as non-human, immaterial and not worth our concern.
Two questions: How can any country anywhere in the world call itself a civilized and just society of free people when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are without shelter and the other life necessities needed by all beings? Secondly, because “homelessness” is pretty much ubiquitous in our country, which could be called a social democracy, why is not a federal/national issue addressed by those agencies of government whose charge it is to maintain and secure the public welfare for all individuals? Is not the right for shelter as basic a human right as food, medical care and freedom of movement?
Language is our most powerful form of communication and it’s almost boundless in its capacity to expand consciousness and awareness, including the mysterious forces of imagination. In reverse, the misuse of language, either knowingly or through ignorance – from name-calling to perfidy to calumny and all the stops in between – is an equally negative potent force. It can be used to oppress human rights, to exploit others for personal gain, and to spread lies in the service of calculated and corrupt self-interest.
