Putting Up With the Pain Freedom Brings

S ticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

This is what my father always told me to say when faced with taunts, with unkind remarks, with the childhood cruelties that are, sadly, part of growing up. He said to walk away after that.

I think I might have even taken this advice a few times, spewing out the refrain in that sing-songy whine that children affect, although I don’t recall that it ever did much good.

Words do hurt, and the pain usually lasts a lot longer than anything borne of sticks and stones.

My father is in his 60s now, a grandfather of four. Maybe he wouldn’t give the same advice today. These are far more dangerous times. Forget about sticks and stones. Look for a gun or a knife.

Yet I will never forget this simple ditty. To be sure, it is cliched, very shopworn and a lot of times, plain wrong.

But the advice is still good. I’m planning to pass it along to the younger generation in my house too.

Words will never hurt me . I hope my daughters can use that part as a shield. I’ll tell them to say those words to themselves. They’ll learn that a bully hates nothing like being ignored.

That’s because words are a lifeline for us all.

Words are for bestowing kindness, for finding something out, for laying things on the table and then dicing them up. Give words a spin and they can carry the force of a missile. The target can fight back, of course. With more words still. The best advice is to choose your words well.

This is a quintessentially American idea. It is codified in the First Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights that just turned 200 years old. Freedom of speech: Let it reign, even when it hurts.

But, wait. What about the racists, the homophobes, the women haters, the anti-Semites, the kooks and liars of various ilk? Surely these people should be stopped. Most people have had quite enough. Hate is a virus very easily caught. Let’s not spread it around.

I could not agree more. The question is how do you “protect” people from hateful speech?

The answer is by speaking out. Call it bad, call it ugly, but do not call for a ban.

Cal State Fullerton has been wrestling with this dilemma for a rather long time. Last week, after much back and forth, the Academic Senate voted to adopt a new non-discrimination policy that includes sanctioning people who intentionally use words to hurt somebody else.

Well, sort of. In the end, the final policy was purposely left a bit vague. There is no list of forbidden words. The part about words that create a “hostile and intimidating environment” was taken out. Sanctions for verbal attacks, anything from a warning to expulsion from school, are those that the student code already includes.

But the policy, which must be signed by the university president, put the school on record as condemning people who insult others “on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability or veteran status.”

One senate member, political science professor Vince Buck, suggested that wording should be changed. He said why not condemn those who insult others “based on intolerance for diversity?” Buck thought that would be simpler all around. He didn’t want to leave anybody out.

“I mean, why not condemn discrimination based on the distribution of hair on your head?” he said.

Mechanical engineering professor Jesa Kreiner, his hair just a little more sparse than Buck’s, seconded his colleague’s motion. But the Buck amendment was voted down.

And nobody was laughing about any of this at all.

I don’t mean to imply that this issue is a joke. It is anything but. It is a political football and a Rorschach test for determining who is sensitive and to what extent. It is a challenge course where the goal is to avoid putting your foot in your mouth.

The idea of saying “the wrong thing” is troubling to many these days. Americans place a very high premium on being nice.

But because we don’t want to offend, we are coming to master the art of talking without saying much at all. Listen to the public pronouncements of most politicians and you’ll appreciate to what depth this blandspeak can sink.

This is, unfortunately, part of the process of trying to get along. Squeeze a problem at one end and it bulges out somewhere else. This is the first thing they should teach in Humanity 101. Look what is happening in the (former?) Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia and what is happening here.

Embracing and appreciating diversity is not an easy task.

The little drama at Cal State Fullerton, and in other universities across the United States, is being played out on a much smaller stage. The students and faculty in Fullerton, of many ethnic backgrounds, are getting along quite well. There were no “incidents” that sparked the changes in the university’s policy clarifying that discrimination and hate are wrong.

And, in the end, most of the members Fullerton’s Academic Senate said they could support the new non-discrimination policy because a last-minute amendment took out any enforcement teeth. They said they hoped this would remove the “chill” that an earlier version had cast over the university’s commitment to upholding free speech.

I hope that, indeed, this is true. Words of all kinds are for using, and yes, that means that they can be abused as well. That hurts.

But there is something worse than facing words propelled by bigotry and hate, and that’s having those words hurled behind your back. Words are the most effective weapon that a democracy has. Free and open debate gets problems solved.