Language Love

I love language. I love how you can play with it, make love with it, use it to touch and to heal.  I think about it almost every day, because I write nearly every day, and I need to communicate in two languages at my work.  We’re in the midst of the saddest season of the year for language lovers; that is, campaign season.  Lies are butchered up into holy grail, words that stab and rend are pounded into us.  Each election we say we’re sick of it, and each election we put up with it. I wish my Dad was here to talk with me about it.  We could complain, and then we could laugh.

My father was born in 1912, and grew up in a German-speaking family in rural North Dakota.  His father (we think) was from southern Germany, his mother (who spoke Russian, Polish, German and probably more languages) came from a small town called Kalusz.   Before the first World War, Kalusz was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  After the Second World War, it didn’t exist.  It changed hands many times in the middle of the twentieth century, fought over by armies who cared nothing for the town.

My father, Walter John Hansel, went to kindergarten at the age of five, speaking only German. It was a tough time to speak only that language, because that language was used by them, our mortal enemies.  Teachers were allowed to hit students, and his teacher told his class that anyone speaking German would indeed be hit.  When he came home crying, his father told the family: “From now one, we speak only English!”  A linguistic inheritance put aside, because of the fear manifested. Not so much in little Walter, but in the teacher, the town, the nation.

My dad enlisted in the Army in 1940, and was in the Aleutian Islands on Pearl Harbor Day.  Eventually, he made it to France and Germany, as part of an anti-aircraft unit.  Like many men of his generation, he didn’t like to talk about what happened during the war.  Bits and pieces came out of him, stories that were told sometimes to one child and not another.  He served in the occupation of Germany, and our nation—who couldn’t accept his language as a five year old, now saw it as an asset.

One story he told me was about a boy of about 8 or 9, who his group met while walking around in the town they were occupying.  The down had been pretty much leveled, and no doubt the boy was hungry. He also had a little radio with him, and one of my dad’s men took it away from him.  My Dad yelled at the soldier, “Why do you want to take that? It’s the only thing he has!”  I never heard, or can’t remember what happened at the end.  My dad was a staff sergeant by then, and could have ordered the man to give it back. Whatever happened to that boy, and that soldier, I don’t know.

But today, I’m thinking that maybe the soldier who took that radio—even though he was the one with all the power in that relationship—was living the language of fear.  I don’t doubt that the soldier had experienced terrible things during the war, and I understand how revenge might rise out of that.  But during the occupation, when there was no resistance, what reason would he have to fear?

But, as I have said elsewhere, it is those who have who fear the most.  Those who have feel threatened by those who don’t.  You would think that having would give you security, but it doesn’t.

There’s a very interesting article by Chrystia Freeland in the New Yorker, where she says

“The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners...the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each.”

And yet these are folks who feel—in Freeland’s view—that they are victims, and that they are being unfairly blamed and even attacked.

See the article at:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland

This Sunday’s Gospel is about the rich young man who had done—or thought he had done—everything he needed to do, but could not separate himself from his possessions, and so “went away sad, for he had great wealth.

I’m still waiting for the Presidential candidates to talk about poverty.  We may be waiting for awhile, but justice for the poor will come.  In the meantime,

Be justice, be beauty…

Patrick