REFLECTIONS
WORDS, USE WITH CARE
Teresita Bacani-Oropilla, MD
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!”
From an English Lullaby by Jane Taylor, 1806
F
rom the very first memories of lullabies
gently lulling us to sleep to the wondrous nursery rhymes firing up our
imaginations and the great readings of our ever widening world,
words, whether sung, spoken or written, have played a great part
in human life.
History, religion, customs and laws have been recorded, and
theories about the sciences, some true, others proven false, have
through the ages been the pillars by which people in their times
lived or died.
How to express the love in one’s heart? How to describe the
despair and treachery of the high and mighty, dig through the
intrigue, cruelty and inhumanity of the warlords and the underworld? These, Shakespeare and the bards and writers have done,
and done unforgettably.
How to understand the lives of heroes and martyrs who died
for the principles of liberty? Lincoln, Martin Luther and Mahatma
Gandhi are in the history books. There, you can relive the great
speech of encouragement of Churchill that mobilized people to
win a war, or Kennedy’s speech urging people to consider what
they could do for their country. Words are powerful motivators
when used wisely to encourage man in times of crises to fight the
evils of the day. Likewise, they can be used by people to perpetuate
the dogma of destruction and annihilation, as with the Holocaust.
What then are we doing now that it is our turn with what we
have inherited? How do we direct or redirect the fortunes of our
countries and the generations after us? If words indeed have played
an important role in our pasts, it would seem that there is no room
for contemptuous rhetoric, nor derogatory, destructive or false
remarks. What good are words that hurt and destroy, or raise the
ire of the people, without offering solutions?
These are trying times for many nations including ours, since
we are in the process of selecting our leaders for the coming years.
On them will depend the policies which will govern our nation. It
will not only affect us but other human beings who may need our
help, or vice versa. There comes a time when bonding together and
working for the common good of all is needed.
Since words are so useful in diplomacy and swaying our collective
actions, may our words be used sparingly, and chosen carefully, and
be used to uplift, to encourage, to think, to persuade us to be more
civil to each other and thus be able to solve the problems of our
planet Earth better. After all, we are all in this together.
Then, we may be able to look up and enjoy seeing the twinkling
of the stars, like diamonds in our skies.
Dr. Oropilla is a retired psychiatrist.
APRIL 2016
11