Insurrection at the Capitol
Why words matter
On January 6, 2021, domestic terrorists and demonstrators besieged the U.S. Capitol. An event that was precipitated by rallies and messages of a stolen election. People were led there by words.
For years, we’ve been fighting over the power of words and their ensuing actions. And each time, in the midst of horrifying violence or incredible harassment, many have said “Words matter.” But so often it would seem that they don’t.
We’re left to see a divided reality of two fundamentally separated substances: either words or actions.
But we don’t treat them as equal. One is ephemeral and non-existent. The other is physical and real. It reminds me of the ancient philosophy, Gnosticism, which tries to separate the spiritual from the flesh. So we act as if our words, once said out loud, dissolve into nothing, but our bodies, our actions, remain.
In the wake of the shooting of an unarmed Black person or school children, a leader can offer “thoughts and prayers.” This is in fact what they are materially offering their constituents—thoughts and prayers. Then we fight about how these are just words and not action. Or perhaps that this is the substance of action.
Then, as the U.S. Capitol is in chaos, the country begs its leaders to do the action of at least saying the comforting words, if nothing else. Say the words that condemn these domestic terrorists. Demand that authorities arrest and charge thousands with felonies.
Our outrage — and perhaps the one true connection among all partisans — is probably this idea: that we feel powerless. And all we hear from our leaders are words.
The separation between words and actions is false. By design.
This isn’t really about partisanship. That’s just a symptom. Our problem is the brokenness of our ideologies.
There is no daylight between speech and action. And not simply because speaking is an act. It is that they are more than linked. They are inseparable. The delineation between speaking and acting, while done to protect speech and keep it free, is having the opposite effect.
On the one hand, it is disempowering speech by reducing the best of it and normalizing the worst of it. We’ve domesticated speech, then left it outside, chained to a tree. We bat away hate speech like it’s a joke. We allow gaslighting to be an opinion. And invite bullying to overwhelm debate.
And this is the other hand. The chilling effect of violent rhetoric and the evasion of responsibility. By separating words from actions, we allow a person to call for a revolution and take no responsibility for its commencing.
In the end, the logical conclusion would be that words are meaningless. Which would make laws and legal documents worthless as well. To that end, all that matters is power and who has it.
Which, if we’re being frank, puts us in no less partisan a position. This thing we do to avoid partisanship ends up making it worse.
Words and actions are interconnected. They always are.
We laud the Declaration of Independence, not for its being speech, just like all the rest, but for what it leads us to believe about ourselves and one another.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Whether these words would be disembodied from the revolution or made to be equal to Captain Underpants reveals the fundamental project of disempowering speech by separating it from reality. It is a kind of death by a thousand cuts — the whittling away at the human project of communicating and ordering ourselves.
At the same time, it is enhancing the other half, standing on the scales of justice by emboldening raw power. We see this in the Supreme Court arguing that Bob McDonald shouldn’t be guilty of corruption because he was bad at it. But innocent people shouldn’t be freed after witnesses recant the testimonies that put them away.
It isn’t just that words matter, it is that the matter of words is tangibly connected to outcomes.
We all know this is true. That’s why many of us are afraid to speak publicly.
That sensation in the pit of the stomach; that fear of pissing off a friend or colleague, a parishioner or coworker, even a stranger on the internet; that’s the proof you know words are active. Just because we’ve accepted a broken narrative about speech doesn’t make it real.
Speaking against the actions of his party and many of his supporters, Sen. Mitt Romney said the truest words of the night:
“The best way we could show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth!”
In this, speaking the truth is actively dangerous, socially difficult, and potentially career-ending. But it is the absence of the truth and the active spreading of deception for political gain that has not only brought us to the brink, but disempowered the majority of the country.
We’re here because specific people took specific actions. They made specific statements. And they motivated specific people to act. It is insanity to try to parse this for particular harms and culpabilities. This is criminal conspiracy.
The people who stormed the Capitol building should all go to jail. The police who enabled their behavior should (at least) be fired. But also, public officials who egged on the conspiracies should be censured, if not arrested.
Otherwise, in giving a kind of qualified immunity to their words, we scrub responsibility for a coup attempt. And ignoring the conspiracies and lies propagated by politicians who swear an oath to uphold the constitution and maintain the public trust ensures that we will all have a more violent future.
We must speak up. And defiantly.
Along with warning of the “moderates in white churches who seem content to do so little,” Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, wrote:
“Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
The willingness to sever the speech from the actions of our community, and ultimately to silence it, is not as an altruistic political correctness, but on behalf of a terrible dishonesty.
Even without the morning rally, the proof of sedition occurred over the months of promises that it would occur. We are doing our democracy no favors by humoring this dissent.
There can be only direct speech and action: a union of behavior pointed toward honesty and the righteous cause of true democracy.
We must set aside, not only the limiting impulses to silence ourselves, but the false arguments that protect violence.
And we must immediately demand the same from our leaders.
