Words matter. [View All]

[DFab420]

The Bible, the Quran, the Torah. All words that have founded powerful religious movements.

Nigger, Spic, Wop, Mic. All words that have the power to insight hate and pain

Did any of you who believe words don't matter ever have a dream?

A dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."?

A dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood?

Are you telling me those words don't matter?

it was words that made us look up at the heavens and land on the moon. "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Don't sit there and say words don't matter.


"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."


It's a copout, and a weak one at that, to claim that speeches and talking don't matter. Our language, our ability to express thought through speaking, is perhaps on of the most powerful, most important parts of what makes us...us.

http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/jfk-space.htm
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo