Trail West Dispatch #9 November 8, 2025

 “Be kind to our language.  Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does.  Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing that everyone is saying.  Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet.  Read books.”                                                                                           –Timothy Snyder

“She’s reading that James Herriot book again” my boys would tell each other when they saw me reading, and giggling unaccountably.  I haven’t read any of those books recently, but I have no trouble remembering the delight of the language in those books.  Herriot wasn’t just kind to the English language.  He made it sing and dance and erupt in paroxysms, always wrapped in a Yorkshire accent.  After Herriot had become a very successful writer, journalists in search of a story would sometimes look him up and ask him to introduce them to some local characters like the ones in his books. 

Herriot always replied, “I can’t.  There aren’t any.”  He went on to say that after the advent of radio, there was a great “flattening” in people’s lives.  Being exposed to the same broadcasts shaped everyone similarly.  No longer did the peculiarities of life in the family, farm, and village form people’s speech and character in colorful variations. If Snyder had observed what happened, he might have described it as everyone “pronouncing the phrases everyone else does” and no longer thinking up their “own way of speaking.” Perhaps we are in more danger of becoming like Englanders in the 1930s-1950s than we know.

Why is it important to be kind to our language in the context of standing against tyranny?  I think it’s likely that speaking and listening thoughtfully helps prevent the “flattening” of our own thinking.  If we hear something said a certain way often enough, we tend not to process it very well anymore.  How often have you heard the phrase “the enemy within?”  What does it mean to you?  Christians who aren’t very aware of current events might hear the phrase as a reminder that Christians have an “old man” within, one that wars against the new creation in Christ.   Or they might think of the phrase in the context of the end of the age, when the man who will deceive many will be revealed as the man of sin. 

As it was used publicly by top officials in the government in recent weeks, the phrase meant “people within US borders who are not supportive of the regime,” critics, in other words.    This is a major shift in meaning.  These people are predominately US citizens, and may include people like us.  In the past, many immigrants have been characterized as enemies (before that it was “criminal” immigrants), but the shift toward viewing law-abiding citizens the same way is new.  Now, all it takes to qualify as an “enemy within” is living in a city that usually votes Democratic--like Portland, OR, Los Angeles, CA, and Chicago, IL.  Someday the definition might be expanded to include Christians who are not the right kind of Christians—the MAGA kind, in other words.

Authoritarians-in-the-making make liberal use of catchy terms like “the enemy within,” and the phrases are increasingly weaponized, with ever-broader applications, till people usually remember only the specific way in which the regime uses the terms, instead of evaluating them for whether they are truthful, accurate, or justified. 

“Poisoning the blood of our country” has been used repeatedly by the president to describe what happens when the population of non-white immigrants increases.  Hitler used the phrase too, as an accusation against non-Aryans, primarily Jews, but others also.  We all know how Hitler’s rhetoric ended. “Poisoning the blood of our country” is flagrantly racist, and in our country right now it usually means anyone with  black or brown skin.  Be on the lookout for chances to counter this by expressing a Jesus-follower view of immigrants, people with non-white skin, or people of a certain political party.                –Miriam Iwashige