It seems to me there is an opposite version of the euphemism treadmill. Before I was born, my father worked with special needs adults, except, back then, the term special needs hadn’t been coined. My dad still uses the polite term, that is, the term which was polite when he was working; I cringe and look pale when he lovingly speaks of the retards he used to drive around and the antics they would get up to. Retard was the polite term, until people understood what it meant, and special needs is just as fun an insult as retard; the schoolmarms have only succeeded in giving us retards a long winded synonym for our peers. No, we are always running away from meaning.
Or destroying meaning.
It seems to me that if a word gains a good meaning, people are just as quick to appropriate it. Lewis writes on this in his introduction to Mere Christianity. Christian, in his time, was becoming a word of praise, not of description. So Lewis describes the decay of the word gentleman. So I have heard people bemoan the loss of any meaning regarding the word love. Nowadays, Christian is more of an insult than anything, and gentleman is nearly meaningless.
I have tried, I have probably failed, to make my life an expression of love. The Four Loves, The Symposium, and Saint John’s great mystery, “God is love,” I have tried to understand and think that I have understood that to understand I must do. I must love. But what is love?
I try to see people as a piece of art, maybe a broken piece, but something meant, intentional, and beautiful. Something not to be used but appreciated, seen. I once heard that, I think it was Michelangelo, when he was confronted about painting nudes, he explained that he wanted to see people the way God sees them. Most people I generally don’t want to see naked, but I do want to love them as God meant them to be loved. Or at least, I want to want to.
And yet, I hear people use the word love while meaning something diametrically opposed to what I mean. It seems, instead of running from meaning or destroying the meaning, love is to be both meaningful and meaningless. We are to do good for one another but never ask what the good is. You see, such questions are unloving, whatever that means. It is unloving to ask whether sodomy is good for people, or cutting off little boy’s dicks good for little boys (perhaps it is being unloving to the doctors as such questions might end their life or staunch their cash flow), or really any other question that would challenge the hellish, libertine paradise we find ourselves in.
Sometimes, I look up and stare at my coworkers and feel such a terrible longing to see them in Heaven, to see them as they were meant to be. May God save us all.
Tale Told 