OPINION: Everything’s weaponized; it’s past time to put away swords

The word of the year seems to be “weaponized.” Like so many overused words, its impact wanes, and certainly any politician repeating it over and over to accuse the opposition of injustice in an election year loses credibility.

The term is tossed recklessly about like the latest fad toy. We should all give it a rest. I’m starting to dislike the innocent word almost as much as the many inane commercials incessantly repeated on television.

Forgive me, but “weaponized” has been weaponized. Yes, it is absurd and annoying to use the annoying to describe the annoying, but how fitting. It seems everything in an election year can be used as a weapon.

This is not a new concept. Politicians have been pulling out the figurative and sometimes, but rarely, literal daggers over much of recorded history. Let’s not forget what Rome’s Senator Brutus did to Caesar. In 1804, U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during an infamous pistol duel. According to History.com, in the years before our Civil War, members of Congress commonly carried weapons to work and sometimes used them. There was the caning of U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, a fatal duel with rifles in Maryland by two U.S. House members, a large-scale fistfight on the U.S. House floor and a fatal knifing by the Arkansas Speaker of the House, on the House floor, for an insult during a debate.

Perhaps less shocking but more dangerous on a larger scale are the weapons of insults, twisted “truths,” outright lies, influence peddling, campaign finance smoke screens, election district gerrymandering, judicial bench stacking, Constitutional misinterpretations, spiritual opportunisms, dog-whistle messages, pork barrel projects, graft, unflattering photos and videos, out-of-context soundbites and now artificial intelligence applications used to create deep fakes.

These weapons influence vulnerable voters (apparently all of us) who may fall prey to or who may be smothered by such tactics. Some will vote and some will drop out in defeat. Herein lies the real danger, and it’s more grotesque than the bloody conflicts in the various government chambers mentioned above: If you immerse voters in all of this weighty garbage, as they sink further toward the bottom, so does our representative democracy.

Therefore, to borrow a Shakespearean phrase from Prince Escalus after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, “All are Punish’d.” I fear for our form of government as the political parties exponentially escalate the rhetoric. Will it be too late for us like it was for the star-crossed lovers? What’s it going to take to turn this downward spiral around?

Some froth at the mouth for another civil war. Some want to assassinate one candidate or another, as we witnessed in July. Our country and the world have already “been-there-done-that” and here we are still facing the same old specters. We need to claw our way out of the sludge pit and realize that working together is much more productive than the self-destruction the various weapons are fostering.

Furthermore, voters must become less gullible by doing their homework, seeking facts and relying less on the drivel campaigns produce. We encourage gridlock if we vote for a party rather than considering the details of a politician’s stances and personal integrity. Accountability flies out the window and the politician becomes spoiled. Spoiled children are annoying. Spoiled politicians are dangerous.

Isolating oneself and listening to only one side of any complex problem is useless, counterproductive and destructive. Taking that one step further, isolationism as a nation begets the same results. Look what isolationism got us in the years before World War I and World War II. Ignoring history, suffering and repeating seems to be the cycle as people either forget, belittle or ignore the lessons of the past. Why must the scope of our memories be so terribly short?

It’s past time to sheath the weapons honed by anger, hate and destructive rhetoric, and remember that “We The People” means all of us here, not a select few, not just those who agree with us, not just those who qualify for a U.S. passport, not just people of one color, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, body type, party affiliation or level of education.

All of us here in this great United States of America deserve better than the daggers flying at and around us. The only solution is working together for the good of our nation, which also makes it necessary to accept that not one of us will always get his or her way.

Gee, of Lewiston, is a retired special education teacher.