I came across the following quote in the Writers & Poets magazine recently:
“Where words prevail not, violence prevails.”
Please pause and sit on that one momentarily. In case you’re wondering, it’s a phrase from Thomas Kyd, a playwright and contemporary of William Shakespeare.
I then squared that quote against another familiar one, “words have power,” meaning that words have energy and power with the ability to help, motivate, demotivate, heal, harm, humiliate and devastate.
With all that said, I also thought about the title of this narrative and its message about the undeniable power of words within the context of the dangers of silence and how silence is sometimes complicit in the spread of hate and violence.
Continue reading The Power of Words: the “said” and the “unsaid” – by Terry Howard
It was an honor to share my perspective as a Jew and diversity professional at Chattanooga’s MLK interfaith service commemorating The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That event was years ago but my passion for diversity is a lifelong legacy from my father, a US World War II military intelligence officer whose letters describing Naziism reside in Cincinnati’s American Jewish Archives. Having dedicated decades to tikkun olam, Hebrew for ‘repair of the world,’ I resonate to this day to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”