On the power and importance of language, going into the next four years

After watching that Kimmel video, I wanted to say a small thing about the importance of language. How one simple, derogatory dig at the outgoing President created this illusion of two separate health care systems. One thing, one that helped save lives, millions of dollars, and kept people healthy that normally would be unuinsured.

One dig at President Obama, by calling it ObamaCare has fooled people into thinking the ACA is a separate thing altogether. That is the power of language, the damage it can cause. Especially when people choose to remain uninformed and do not question what they hear in the mediate. That woman’s face in the still, the wheels grinding to a halt you can see in her eyes as she realizes what a mistake she’s made because she doesn’t like Obama! is what I feel a lot of folks are going to be doing when the incoming regime hacks the ACA to pieces and replaces it with a HSA (Health Savings Account).

When so many people die or suffer, or have long, drawn out fights with disease or pass away when they can’t afford medicines or keep up treatments? When the ACA is done in by hatred, by the sheer bloody mindedness of those who opposed it simply because it’s called Obamacare, who wave around their But I support the ACA! without realizing that it’s the same.damned.thing?

Then we’ll hopefully realize the power of language, how misusing and abusing it can lead to things like this. How using alt-right instead of Neo Nazi softens the discourse until it is impotent and useless. How refusing to name things for what they are gives them even more power than before. Callous mislabeling of things like this? Of the ACA with a jab aimed at our outgoing President that allowed people to blithely go around thinking they are doing something for the good of others?

Maybe then people will wake up to how they’ve been led around by misinformation, malicious misnomers dressed up in concern for the country because of the lies people willingly swallow without the benefit of sugar to make it go down easier. They smile as they take their bitter draughts and ask for more until finally, someone sweetens it with truth and let’s them discover it for themselves.

There’s gonna be a lot of remorse when freedoms, liberties, healthcare and more is stripped away by the man-child put into power by those who put everything ahead of their self interest, who doomed the rest of us by voting with their hatred, their foolishness and their belief that their country was lessened somehow being led by a black man rather than white. Who took the bait of emails and servers rather than overlooked a rapist, a failed business man who gave empty promises, who can’t handle the mildest criticism.

This ignorance of the harm language, words and their power can do are but a small part of how we got here. Why tomorrow the country will fall to darkness and hate. Why we’re all in danger, but only some of the country can see what we’re about to become.

I’m not gonna lie and say I have optimism for anything that will come from the next four years with a bully at the helm. I just hope I survive it, stronger, harder and with more resolve than I go into it with.