The New Nazi

I usually hate when a conversation descends into calling someone a "nazi" or a "communist". This line of attacking someone never helps the conversation along a certainly never gets your point across. I even wrote a blog post making fun of it. I think these have crept into our conversations because of how politicians overused them as scare tactics to drum up votes based on fear of someone who isn't like "us".

I'm noticing that the word "terrorist" is now making its way into the same place as the word nazi. With rhetoric like "digital terrorists" and "political terrorists" we have cheapened yet another word to scare people into voting for someone. The term hasn't lost all meaning but it's worth is radically decreasing with every blog post accusing every act of violence or even civil disobedience as being terrorism.

So much has the word been banded about that the first thing anyone thinks about when some nut does something crazy is "Was it a terrorist!?" and then wait for the news to carelessly throw the word about to confirm everyone's fears.

I noticed this a lot during the last presidential race when people from the Tea Party where calling then Mr. Obama a terrorist because at one point in his life he identified as a Muslim and in any crackpots uninformed opinion that alone equates to being a terrorist.

We live in an ever-increasing cycle of people pushing small differences of opinion into arguments over absolute good and evil. If these kinds of arguments are the best you can come up with to defend your position then it might be telling about how wrong you are. The world is never black and white and we have never lived in a world of just good and evil. There are always grey areas and it's our responsibility as citizens, and as voters, to weigh every decision we make separately with out applying fear and social bias to color the outcome.