Ed Milliband MP speaking at the Labour Party conference. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Name calling is just that, it is the stick prodding last resort of the stressed out or desperate.
Guilty this last couple of weeks? Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic (I nearly said Channel, it is that slim a distance, that much of an irrelevance).
This is the thin edge of bullying, where the powerful or influential reduce their debate to a single word. Have you ever been picked out in the playground and name-called? Starting a boarding prep school at 8 some decades ago I was told my name would be Vernon Min and my number was 105. I was min because I had an older brother Mi and a cousin Ma … as in Major, Minor and Minimus. If there were four family names (always brothers or cousins), then the eldest become ‘Maximus’. So what was I called from thenceforth? ‘Vermin’.
Five years later after a serious accident and six months off school I turn up at my public school just out of crutches with a walking stick and lace up ankle boots as one foot is smaller than the other. I am quickly identified by the bully in my own year group and nicknamed ‘booties’.
This isn’t about my short-lived pain of four decades ago – it is however about the disgusting way those with power, whose words are heard, translated and repeated can name call, whether it is Obama giving his rival a term that sounds like a disability label ‘Romnesia’ or a Conservative politician in a moment of frustrating resorting to a prefectorial public school boy jibe by calling someone a ‘pleb’. He should be pitied, and educated, not sacked. While the policeman who leaked this to a national newspaper should also be picked on by the press – and sacked. The game is mutual. And as for ‘Yob’ – this is what our Labour Party leader called either the pleb calling Tory or our Prime Minister the other day in parliament.
Labelling, name calling, using power to foister tags, sound-bites or anything else will be very quickly picked up and spread like a sneeze. I just hope enough people online see this name calling for what it is.
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