Cut the crap ...

Americans in general, and Mennonites in particular, have a problem. We don’t know how to speak our minds.

The problem is this: we’re in a multicultural society, and tolerance is (generally) the word of the day. Tolerance, everyone understands, means not making other people upset. If other people have opinions that aren’t the same as ours, the logical thing to do is avoid talking about our opinions, right?

Not right.

Just listen to how people talk around campus. Whenever an opinion is involved, it is almost always buried under obfuscations, doublespeak, and insistence that no one takes it seriously. It would be simpler for the speaker to say nothing, since that is the value he gives his speech. As William Strunk wrote in his immortal Elements of Style: "Omit needless words."

Centuries ago, no one worried about whether their opinions would offend. They stated them outright, in language that today looks rude. Arguing against Anabaptists’ pacifism, Martin Luther wrote that the spiritual ancestors of the modern Mennonite Church wouldn’t slap at the fleas that bit them as they sat in prison. Menno Simons gave it right back to the Lutherans, too: "They strike up a Psalm ... while beer and wine verily run from their drunken mouths and noses." This isn’t polite disapproval but outright mockery. Back then, it was the expected cut and thrust of debate.

Compare that Menno’s spiritual descendants, who can talk endlessly about processes without saying what they’re processing and put so much spin in a college recruiting brochure that students can actually enroll at a Mennonite college without knowing what a Mennonite is.

Not that we ought to go for the throat in every debate, but if we would no longer fear saying precisely what we think, there would be a lot fewer needless words everywhere.