Baby Boomer Reflections on the Power of Words

I suppose I am succumbing to the siren’s call of linear logic lulling me to begin at the beginning. I want to share with you the origin of my first thoughts of how words do indeed become flesh.

I feel compelled to take you back to a much earlier time: a time before most of us were born. It is in reflecting back on this time that we can begin to understand the power and influence that words wield in our lives.

The year is 1945. World War II is finally over. It is a tumultuous time . . . the world is emerging from the fog of war. . . . Words of dictators have become the flesh of death and devastation.

With parched lips longing for water to quench his thirst, Coleridge’s ancient mariner cried out: “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink!” Like the suffering seafarer, David Hart, the man who would become my mentor and analyst, and other American soldiers serving in WWII, experienced an unquenchable longing. From 1941-1945, words delivered by dictators echoed everywhere in the din of war, but, until September 1945, there were no words of peace to soothe David Hart’s thirst for home. Nor were there any words to help him and others make sense of the senseless slaughter of so many. Words of war had become flesh.

By 1945 the youthful flesh of so many soldiers and civilians from different lands was now strewn like crushed violets over the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific. My grandmother used to say, “Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet gives off to the heel that crushes it.” It would be a long time, if ever, that anyone would forgive those who had brought this war upon our world.

Among those returning home were my father, my Uncle Vinnie, and my Uncle Hank. My father was left with a permanent back injury when his plane was shot down and crashed in the Coral Sea. My Uncle Vinnie marched to Berlin for Hitler’s final stand. My Uncle Hank survived the sinking of the aircraft carrier he was on by a German submarine near the Canary Islands.

Benjamin Disraeli once said, “With words we rule men.” Adolph Hitler’s war-waging words had whipped the German people into a frenzy. A whole generation of Germans had harbored in their hearts the highly-charged words of revenge. They were angry at the humiliating treaty following the First World War. The German people had had their noses rubbed in the dirt by the punitive terms set forth in the treaty.

As I was to discover in my training as a psychologist, Hitler appealed to the repressed narcissistic rage of his generation of Germans. Angry and humiliated parents had reared a whole generation of angry and humiliated children who were now adults devouring Adolph’s words.

I would later learn how Hitler had played out the buried rage of his childhood on the world stage. In reading the various works of Alice Miller, I learned that Hitler was brutally beaten, tormented, and humiliated every day of his early life by his half-Jewish father.

However, as any abused child, Hitler was forced to deny his suffering at the hands of his father. Instead of being able to acknowledge his justified anger at his abusive, dictatorial father, Hitler identified with his father and grew up to be just like him.

Eventually, Hitler’s repressed rage at his half-Jewish father was directed at all Jewish people. His words became the flesh of brutality inflicted on innocent victims. Victimized Adolph became victimizing Adolph. His words awaken the anger of a whole generation of other adults who were themselves beaten as part of their upbringing. But Hitler was not the only dictator driven by words of rage and revenge hidden in his heart.

Strutting like a peacock but with the body of a gorilla, Benito Mussolini jutted out his jaw and pounded his bare chest. Then he’d stand on stage with his arms folded. Mussolini’s inflammatory words of war attempted to spur the Italians into action. Like Hitler, Mussolini had a troubled childhood. Biographers describe him as a rebel and a bully when he was a child: he was expelled from school for stabbing another student and throwing an ink pot at a teacher.

After the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, F.D.R. galvanized us into rallying ‘round the flag with his words of patriotism. Churchill’s words saved Britain’s spirit. Words broadcast by the seductive and sultry voice of Tokyo Rose tried to demoralize American soldiers serving in the Pacific.

Then, on the second day of September 1945, words of relief were broadcast over radios all over the world. “The war is over in the Pacific!” World War II had ended. The war in Europe had ended four months earlier on the eighth day of May. Triumph and tragedy. The war was over but so many had died or were left disabled.

• Today, just consider the power of your words. Words of kindness or anger leave their mark.