My least favorite part of sitting in a dentist’s chair doesn’t involve the drilling, suctioning, or poking. It’s the moment when the dentist wraps my tongue in gauze and starts yanking it left and right. That hurts. I know it’s part of oral cancer screening, but wincing anxiously under the exam light, my mind goes straight to a medieval torture chamber.
“No one can tame the tongue,” declares the writer of the Letter of James, which suggests the writer had never been to a dentist. But presumably he had more than physical constraint of the tongue in mind. Is it true that the tongue can’t be trained to keep coarse and brutal language at bay? Is there no way to hold off lies and propaganda? What about the self-serving images or words of deceit that roll off our tongues? Is taming all of this impossible? These are worthwhile questions to ask, especially in an era when many are wondering where public civility went.
President Trump’s reported use of a vulgar word while speaking to legislators in the White House last month aroused the ire of the public. I’m not sure it was the vileness of the word itself—though the word is packed with contempt—that people responded to as much as the disdainful reference to the people of entire countries and continents. These would be real people, breathing human beings, worth loving and knowing.
