Say what you mean and mean what you say

By Terry Savage •

Arriving at a university such as ours can feel challenging. The campus is lush with Floridian beauty, in its architecture and with its palm trees, its fountains, and the sound of water. It is also populated with people set on living out their passions: preserving turtles, tagging sharks, healing people, healing other species of life, hitting a baseball to Bermuda and beyond, making music, making people laugh from behind a microphone, debating global crises in faraway places that somehow reach, wrenchingly, into our souls.

And amid this, there is the learning, with all the seemingly endless new information to take in. It’s a lot to absorb, and process.

Yet being a student is not only about taking in, getting more. It is also about what you put out – whether you’re writing exams or in the patience entailed in mentoring or simply in your response to the challenges that come, inevitably, as you grow your dream.

And in what you give out, words matter.

Ask anyone who has had to protest their innocence in a court of law how they felt when the verdict “not guilty” was finally uttered. Ask a loved one whether it helped when, after you took responsibility for some thoughtless act, you said, “This is on me, I did this, I’m sorry.” Or ask a kid their favorite word and watch the smile that spreads through their face.

I recall from my own student days in southern Africa a campaign against date rape on campus. The slogan for which ran, “Coffee means Coffee and No means No.” An invitation to a beverage, to a meal, or to study together is only that: it is not sexual availability.

Saying what you mean and meaning what you say: it’s a basic skill worth cultivating. It demands courage and it improves mental hygiene. It clears space to enjoy what you really value. It gives a clearer – bolder – mind in your work. It makes for dependable friendships and enables us to see that smarmy humor that belittles another person for what it is: a cheap shot. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

For words are action. Words produce outcomes, whether hurtful or helpful. It is therefore chilling, no less, as we head into elections in the U.S. and elsewhere, to continually hear the comment, “I would rather have a leader who mouths off speaking ill of others and does good than one who speaks articulately and does badly.”

That’s like saying, I would rather have a poisoned tree spewing poison with tasty fruit than a healthy tree that provides little fruit.

Democracies have a way of producing leaders who are both articulate and effective in their actions. These are figures who seem to embody much needed values and are then able to grow public consensus around those values and turn those values into policy – into decent politics.

Think Martin Luther King’s dream of a day when people would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Or New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, after that country’s first mass shooting in over 20 years, vowing not to give the man who had attacked two mosques any celebrity by ever uttering his name: “speak the names of those who were lost,” she said, “rather than the name of the man who took them.” Or think Kwame Nkrumah shouting “Free at last!” tears streaming down his face, as the British flag was lowered for the last time and Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to end colonial occupation.

The words of great leaders define a moment in history. So do the words of leaders who foment xenophobia and hatred. Glib spectacles of public loathing and ridicule of political opposition is not leadership. It’s toxic. It applauds a brazen dearth of human empathy. And it leads nowhere but nihilism.

Dr. Terry Savage, an associate professor in Halmos College’s Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, has researched and worked on the politics of reconciliation in the African Great Lakes region, Kurdistan, Nepal and the Maghreb.