In a recent My View (The words we use make a difference,” River Reporter, May 7-13), the writer evokes a number of reactions. He asks rhetorically whether a “good American” could fail to acknowledge that the U.S. is the “least racist country,” while living in a township where he could easily know every Black resident by name. 

That’s as near to humor as the essay comes. Most of his points, framed as negative declaratory statements, suggest Aristotelian leanings, or the skills of a rhetorician (much like Trump) to avoid affirmative utterances by employing the philosopher’s apophasic techniques. 

So, for example, the writer establishes a proposition—“Killing the President whom you did not vote for is not the American way”—that negates a predicate of the rights of a citizen. When the conditions necessary to enforce those rights (essentially the failure of the structural guardrails) have been fulfilled, the Declaration makes it more of a duty than a right for the citizen to act. That is the basis of American exceptionalism, and what made us an attractive example to peoples under colonial rule.

“Fighting words,” while not without consequences, should not be the rationale for violence… unless one belongs to a Christian denomination that has adapted Ecclesiasticus 28:17 to its O.T.: “The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh; but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones.”

John A. MacKinnon
Lackawaxen, PA