The word of 2024 will be “entirely.”
It drifts in from 2023, as in “ . . the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible . . .”
Is it possible to blame Israel for what’s happening now or, for that matter, think the war “entirely” the fault of Hamas?
Sure, but even if you can somehow say that a person who shoots concertgoers or drops bombs on neighborhoods is in no way responsible—entirely unresponsible— for those acts, this confines the word to your view of history and politics and (as is so often true) to which side you are on.
But as brutal as the use of “entirely” is in the especially brutal context of Gaza, what is “entirely” troubling is the climate of psychology in our culture, in how rhetoric and ideas are steady tools to club someone to a pulp rather than to reflect publicly, in how we are divided from each other and ourselves—red from blue, the righteously correct from the yet more righteously correct, winner from loser—such that few of us know how to cross any divide in who we talk to, what we say to ourselves, and how hold off before presuming the worst.
Yes, people have always written and thought carelessly (myself more than most), and the narrative of the day is not always, or even often, the narrative of the truth: A college friend tells me that the Jewish students on her campus and those who belong to the SJP have been meeting regularly to take care of one another a story which, predictably, gets no play in any newspaper.
We have not yet, in other words, slipped entirely off a cliff, are not looking back up to that once safe ledge nor rushing down to the doom below—not yet, not entirely.
Thus we might be careful of such words and their reflexive use in 2024, might seek out the partial, marshall small steps, and find those increments of good in our doings, our tolerance of others, and our presumptions that help us embrace that eternal reality that, save for flimsy and mortal, none of us is entirely any one thing.