When a car hurtles past me and three other vehicles just as a timber lorry comes round the blind corner towards us, I sometimes surprise myself with the interesting language that emerges from a folder deep in my brain that I am normally blissfully unaware of.
Where’s it all come from - that level of aggressive language that we encounter and even practise daily? Mainstream and social media are hate-filled. Children use words I never heard till I was an adult and react belligerently in the home, the street and the school – teachers tell me that when children have anger management issues, it’s not unusual to go home bruised and battered.
It’s a sad day when the report of an accident on social media, on a page that aims to help folk negotiate a sometimes hazardous rural route, is greeted with posts that decry the drivers involved, moan about the inconvenience, and suggest the driver must have been a woman or that the person to blame would be riding a motorbike.
All of this when the original post clearly suggests that someone may at best be on their way to hospital in a helicopter and at worst, at least one family could be grieving the loss of a loved one.
We can’t blame it all on aggressive on-line games.
I really don’t think that our senior politicians are playing Fortnite – the online video game in which every character bar the one carrying the first aid kit seems equipped with a deadly weapon. I don’t believe that today’s newspaper subeditors take their inspiration from their Xboxes to write headlines that incite violence against migrants and refugees, or encourage sectarianism and racism.
Violent and aggressive language breeds violence and aggression. When people feel marginalised, patronised, and downright afraid because of the uncertainties in their lives, it is all too easy to play a blame game, encouraged by the words and actions we hear and read.
Pax Christi Scotland became a member of Pax Christi International this year, and our main role (while obviously campaigning against the very existence of nuclear weapons and the proliferation of the arms trade) will be to take the concept of nonviolence into the family, the school, the parish and the wider community. We are already developing resources and planning courses that support Pope Francis and Pax Christi International in mainstreaming nonviolence, in the words of PCI’s co-president Marie Dennis, “…as a spirituality, lifestyle, programme of societal action and a universal ethic”.
In other words, nonviolence isn’t just about seeking peace in a global sense, but seeking to promote dignity and respect in our daily lives. As teacher Roisin King told us at our weekend gathering, when she lets a child know he is loved, respected and cared for, that he is rated with his peers, then he thrives.
And I know my day is better served when I pray for that risk-taking driver than when I let rip with language I shouldn’t know in the first place.