For some time, two questions have been bothering me. The first is this: why do we keep bringing back into the news the title of a book that almost no one has read for at least fifty years and whose content would make people scream to communism and anarchy those who gargle about it? The second: why and in the name of what would I go back to using a word that disappeared from my vocabulary for thirty years, if not more, that I have never used and will never use either in its truncated version, since this is only its long version modestly made up?
Because I’m free? Because I have the right?
Of course I have the right. I can say just about anything I want, when I want, and where I want. Several of our charming columnists and would-be debaters even prove to us that one can incite contempt, even hatred, with impunity. But this is irrelevant, though not so much, when you really think about it.
Of course, I’m free. Free to nickname Cyrano my neighbor who suffers from her big nose. Free to remind my severely dyslexic cousin that even if a book bears the title The idiot, this Dostoyevsky novel is not within his reach. If my neighbor lacks humor, that’s not my problem. And my cousin now earns twice my salary mending pieces of pipe, so what is he complaining about? The genius of Depardieu, the beauty of Rappeneau’s film, the works of Rostand and Dostoyevsky are MY culture, they are part of MY history, of MY journey.
All my neighbor and my cousin want is to use THEIR story to victimize themselves and make ME feel guilty, and censor ME, if not to blacklist the foundations of my being, I who am only light and truth.
A word too many, a word in nothing, which we like to repeat under fallacious motives, out of political opportunism, to create a sensation when the news leaves us in the lurch, when we are looking for like to reassure himself about the sterility of his impertinence. But, above all, a word that is abused to invalidate those it slaps, a word that is used to show them their insignificance in a free society and which still has rights. Patrimonial rights, not to say ancestral rights, don’t mind.
Of course, I have rights and I am free. Free also and above all to hear and listen, free to recognize that, even if I do not always understand the reasons and the issues, the demands and claims of those with whom I share my life and my space can be justified. .
Free to admit that I have the right and the duty to ban certain words from my vocabulary because they offend, because they hurt, even if, to me, they seem trivial and even more when they are not . Especially when the weight of numbers and that of history place me in a position of strength.