My personal understanding of chaos simply entails the inability
to decipher conflicting messages that I encounter while roaming the
earth, seeking peace and beauty and the American dream. The problem
here lies in my ability to decipher the things that I hear, and my
willingness to trust various modes of communication and the
communicators’ specific intentions and meanings. While language and
the study of language seems like a dead art sometimes, it becomes
increasingly important at this moment, while our nation is under a
barrage of “messages” and “speeches” and whatever else they’re
sending us from “on high” (e.g. Capitol Hill). While I do not wish
to discuss the war business, I’d like to discuss the underlying
pretenses of what is happening to us, communicatively, as we listen
to the things that our leaders tell us about everything.
In our media-frenzied society, we subscribe to a number of
different voices-from the television, magazines, radio and
newspapers. We see headlines, we catch snippets of press
conferences, we hear an opinion that fits what we want to believe
and we run with it. While we have full choice to do this, and thank
goodness for that choice, we also make ourselves vulnerable to some
very crafty people who practice the art of twisting words to
comprise new meanings.
People place implications on words and cause us to view
situations in a skewed manner, or, more accurately, they place new
names on old situations. This can result in the metamorphosis of
our opinions about those old situations. So when the language used
in media broadcasts and articles has pushed around our opinions, we
have a problem. That problem being the fact that, on the surface,
we think that we have a unique opinion and loyalty to some specific
concept when in actuality we’re just, under a new name, supporting
something that we previously did not support. This is chaotic. It’s
not just the deception; it’s the fact that most of us don’t know
our right from our left. We don’t know what words mean. We get
emotional and forget to look at the dictionary. For years, I have
been listening to teachers telling students “LOOK IT UP”-I’ve taken
vocabulary test after vocabulary test. Yet I still willingly
believe whatever I hear from the newspaper because those people are
smarter than I am and because they know what they are talking
about-they’ve been around longer. While those things may be true,
they are not necessarily true. Chances are, they started out
writing ignorant opinion columns at their universities and got
lucky enough to make it big and get their stuff in nationally
circulating periodicals. Of course, they could be told what to say
in the first place, which is worse than being ignorant. I’m sure I
could make a ton of money saying things for someone else, but I
hope I would have the integrity to refuse that option.
How, then, does one start to learn to decipher what they hear?
How can someone stop being ignorant? How can we begin to gain some
control over what we listen to and then believe? We’ve got to start
looking stuff up. We’ve got to stop creating our own definitions,
or thinking that we know what we mean when we say words that sound
intelligent. We’ve got to read, skeptically, from both sides of
whatever story. Those people aren’t smarter than we are; they just
know how to write sentences and manipulate meanings. However, that
does not mean that we have to take all of their “truths” at face
value.
Joy Murphy is a senior English major.