Every day I walk my children the half a mile to their school. We chat, laugh, sometimes get wet, sometimes get splashed by drivers, sometimes nearly get knocked over by parents driving their children to school. It got me thinking, that this thing we call the ‘School Run’ has become a School Drive in many areas, and how inaccurate the phrase School Run is. It implies running, a healthy activity that doesn’t involve motor vehicles, but the School Run now only seems to mean driving the kids to school in a sense that it is a regular, essential activity.

Essential, my arse!

So I started to think how many other phrases and words have become euphemisms, to cover up the environmentally destructive or otherwise harmful nature of activities. Here is one that really winds me up: ‘Road Accident’. I cannot describe the inconsistency between the way individuals off the road and those on the road are subject to the law better than this:

We as a society seem to have decided that motor vehicles are quasi-autonomous beings, and the driver is almost never at fault when the vehicle mysteriously lashes out and kills someone.

When something happens that involves a motor vehicle, and that vehicle is being driven (even in the loosest sense of the word), then someone, somehow is to blame. It is not acceptable to say “oh, but that turns us into a blame culture”, because if there is blame to be apportioned then it should. When a person is killed on a pedestrian crossing, and that person had right of way, or someone is killed while walking on the pavement because a careless driver mounted the kerb, then that isn’t an accident. It is a killing.

And here is another one, beloved of readers of those morally bereft British newspapers The Daily Mail and The Daily Express: ‘Speed Traps’. Speed traps! What! How dare the speeding motorist be trapped by the loutish behaviour of authorities who are trying to reduce the speed of vehicles, and thus save lives!

I jest, of course. The aforementioned newspapers spend a great deal of column inches writing about the ‘euphemistic’ phrase Safety Cameras, when that phrase perfectly describes their role. They are there to impose rules on vehicle speed in order to reduce deaths.

The euphemisms I have mentioned here are just three in a huge range of phrases that protect the destructive tendencies of our culture from closer analysis. We are told of ‘Externalities’ instead of the environmental damage caused by companies that affects non-company property; we hear of ‘Standards Of Living’ rising rather than material consumption and thus environmental damage; we are brainwashed with ‘Technological Improvements’ that mask the need to sell essentially the same products again and again to raise profits.

We are wallowing in a culture that has forgotten how to talk clearly about itself – because if we were to do that, then maybe we would think again as to whether we should just shove this culture up our ‘rear ends’.

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And proud member of The Sietch