Words aren’t really adequate but I have precious little else to go on. And if someone does not want to hear my words, or considers them hurtful, I can be silent or I can speak anyway, but not necessarily as freely as I  might wish.

When your words are used against you, misconstrued, torn from their meaning to serve someone else’s. When there’s nothing you can do to re-establish facts, when you’re left with the dregs of words-for-everybody, the social ah yes, the social smiles and bons mots,the more or less hurtful gossip, the one-size-fits-all generalizations. When other people’s words must serve as approximations to your own, because your own don’t seem to matter much.

Am I alone in such a situation? Oh no, far, far from alone. This does not lessen the pain, and how could it.

Bread and roses, indeed. What we marched for, only to be laughed at or silenced, one way or another, even, at times, by the very children for whom we marched and fought and struggled because we loved them and wanted a better world for them.

But we weren’t perfect, you see. We had flaws and failings, and, apparently, those are not acceptable, not in the days of perfect minds to match perfect bodies, both only attainable in virtual settings.

“A sharing of life’s glories – bread and roses, bread and roses.“Still possible, somewhere, somehow? If we so insist, perhaps.There are no guarantees, you see, only striving, over and over and over again because each generation of us is so short.

No, I will not provide an immediate translation of these words. I’ll let someone else speak for me since people seem to pay attention to her words, these days. Not for long, I suppose but here they are, while the attention lasts:

From the 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture:

“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.” Toni Morrison