The 2018 Word of the Year is TOXIC

I don’t know which is a sadder commentary, the fact that the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is “toxic”, or the fact that it’s no surprise at all to have read that in the paper this morning.

Oxford says it chooses the word that is “judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupation of that particular year”, and I’d have to reluctantly agree that they nailed it with their choice this year.

I have strong feelings about where the principal blame lies for this state of affairs, but I don’t do politics in this blog so I will keep those to myself. Besides, placing blame will do nothing to improve the situation.

Instead, I’d like to focus on where the solution is likely to be found. We won’t get the solution from our political “leaders”, who appear locked in to a downward spiral of competitive name-calling. We won’t get it from the media, because each round of fresh bile seems only to boost ratings and sell more papers. And, as far as moral leadership coming from established religions, I’ll leave that up to your individual conscience to decide.

In fact, individual conscience is the only thing I see that contains the hope of a solution. When there’s a leadership vacuum, it can only be filled from below: from the individual choices and behaviors of individuals like you and me. What can we do? We can’t solve all the world’s problems, but we can make a difference where we are, with what we have.

The first thing we can do is defensive; we can avoid getting sucked into the vortex of incivility. I have a Facebook “friend” who delights in sending me provocative political memes on an almost daily basis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost taken his bait and responded in kind, but that’s not going to accomplish anything useful. I try to remind myself of the old saying: “Never wrestle with a pig; the pig enjoys it and you both get dirty.”

You also want to be as careful about what you put into your mind as you are about what you put into your mouth. I’ve also found it helpful to go on a “toxic cleanse”. As a news junkie, I wouldn’t find it realistic to quit cold turkey, but I’ve scaled back the amount of time I spend consuming news media, and I think it makes a difference.

On a positive and proactive note, I’d like to think that we could make a difference by confronting and calling out others when they’re being toxic, but realistically that’s not likely to work. At the very least, though, we can all do our part by modeling non-toxic conversation and behavior, by not taking disagreements personally, by speaking out against obvious examples of bullying or overbearing behavior, by making the effort to understand and find common ground, when we do get pulled into these types of conversations.

As recently as 2015 that the WOTY was the “Happy face with tears” emoji, so there’s no law of nature that says the ethos of a particular year inevitably has to be bad. These things tend to generate their own correction, and each one of us has the ability to give the pendulum a slight upward nudge, and let’s make next year’s WOTY a positive one!