Have you left no sense of decency?
Before Tom Hanks was a major star, he was in this film called Splash where Daryl Hannah’s character picked the name “Madison” off a street sign because she didn’t know any better.
As of 2012, it’s the 4th most popular name for girls in America.
And then there was recently this fake news article by the Onion that the official Iranian news agency essentially copied and put up as true.
Finally, in the story of creation in both the bible and Greek mythology, a higher power – God in the former, Prometheus (or Athena) in the latter – takes clay and literally breathes onto them to give them life.
There’s something about words that live independently of ourselves. These throwaway things we say and do continue on without us.
Do you remember the pink slime thing I wrote a few months ago? As I thought, the price of beef is dramatically higher now. Another fake news story with very real world implications.
I’m much more careful about the stuff I put out into the aether cause I know that words put out into the world manage to take a life on their own. Even if we just want things to be hot breath and lies.
Write this because, as the political season heightens, I’m finding my online world being filled with more and more with things that are completely untrue – on both sides of the fence.
And I wonder if anyone feels at all even slightly bad about doing whatever it takes to win.
Cause what really is winning if we’re left with ridiculous names, high beef prices, and lies as truth.
What kinda prize is that?
Joseph N. Welch: Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Location: still home with a bum leg
Mood: (really) slothful
Music: I’ll settle for one day to believe in you
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2 replies on “Saying things give them life”
[…] I said out loud once, “That’s not true” – because saying things give them life – and realized at that moment it wasn’t. It was kinda true, which is very different […]
[…] like Greek myths because they spoke something to the young me. They still […]