Words Can Heal
A new non-profit was launched in September 2001 to reduce verbal violence and gossip in the United States, particularly in American schools. America was reeling from September 11 and we were in a state of crisis. Anger and fear caused us to strike out and nationalism and patriotism had the unintended side effects of alienating and hurting those seen as outsiders. Words, used intentionally in spite or unintentionally because of cultural illiteracy, can cause great harm no matter the environment. But, in a time of crisis, the wrong words can be very damaging, both to people and nations.
Words can also motivate and inspire. As Loginus wrote in 1st Century BC: “For words finely used are in truth the very light of thought.”
WordsCanHeal.org was formed “to promote the value and practice of ethical speech in order to improve our democracy, build mutual respect, honor and dignity in our country.”
It was particularly targeted to the problem of bullying in schools. According to Irwin Katsof, co-executive director of WordsCanHeal.org, “In the post-Columbine era we need to reduce gossip and verbal abuse that is behind so much pain in our society, families and businesses in order to help heal our country.”
Bullying is not a problem confined to the United States. Australian researchers surveyed more than 2,600 secondary school students in Victoria, Australia, at age 13 and a year later. According to the researchers, about half reported being “teased, having rumors spread about them, being deliberately excluded from a group, or experiencing physical threats or violence.” In their report in the British Medical Journal, the authors reported that “two-thirds of those who were victimized were bullied more than once, and a history of bullying was found to be a good predictor for later self-reported depression and anxiety.”
The United States’ National Education Association says that 160,000 children stay home from school daily because of bullying. Up to 77 percent of middle and high school students in small Midwestern towns have been bullied according to the U.S. Department of Education.
The campaign to raise awareness of the problem of verbal abuse includes posters, national television commercials and printed material, including a book, The Words Can Heal Handbook: How Changing Your Words Can Transform Your Life and the Lives of Others by co-authors Chaim Feld, Irwin Katsof and Hilary Rich.
We can all participate in the campaign with a key component of the program that includes the WordsCanHeal pledge:
“I pledge to think more about the words I use. I will try to replace words that hurt with words that encourage, engage and enrich. I will try to see how gossip hurts people, including myself, and work to eliminate it from my life. I will not become discouraged when I am unable to choose words perfectly because making the world a better place is hard work. And I am helping to do that, one word at a time.”
It’s always been recognized that words have power as shown in these quotes from Words on Words by David Crystal & Hilary Crystal
Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively ideas than the Sight of Things themselves.
–Joseph Addison, 1712, “Secondary Pleasure of the Imagination: Consideration Limited to Liberature,” The Spectator
Freshness of words, simplicity of emotions,
If we lost these, would it not be as through
Blindness had stricken Fra Angelico,
Or an actor lost his power of voice and motion?
–Anna Akhmatova, 1917 in White Flock
Words –- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!
–Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1841-52, American Notebooks
