We are one letter away from a better world

I awoke this morn­ing think­ing about the con­cept of “over:” over-share, over-indulge, over-take, etc. I won­dered if attach­ing “over” to the verbs in our lives is a bad thing. My first incli­na­tion was that if we hov­er “over” any­thing, we are some­how dom­i­nat­ing it, risk­ing arro­gance in ser­vice to our egos.

To under­stand my ear­ly morn­ing philo­soph­i­cal query, I resort­ed to a cus­tom­ary strat­e­gy. I dug into the ety­mol­o­gy of the word “over,” and learned an amaz­ing tid­bit. The word “over” evolved from the Proto-Indo-European word “upo,” which means “under,” as to come “up from under.”

Here, on the morn­ing of March 15, the day of Julius Caesar’s demise in 44 BCE, I find myself con­tem­plat­ing whether it is okay to blind­ly com­mand any­thing. An inves­ti­ga­tion of the vocab­u­lary of dom­i­nance seems par­tic­u­lar­ly time­ly today, since muni­tions bought with our hard-earned tax dol­lars are rain­ing down from above on peo­ple in oth­er lands.

On that note, there is remark­able import to the ques­tion of who among us decides to over-whelm per­ceived ene­mies. Do we impetu­ous­ly reign over oth­ers, or do we come up from under­neath by under­stand­ing the sit­u­a­tion before we act? Since we insist that we are enam­ored with a doc­u­ment that begins with the words “we the peo­ple,” I tend to believe that most of us pre­fer the latter. 

Our over­lords seem to have for­got­ten a sem­i­nal idea about how the promise of America is imag­ined. Lately, when I write to our con­gres­sion­al del­e­ga­tion to ask if that is still true, I receive a cut-and-paste email with the salu­ta­tion in a dif­fer­ent font than the boil­er­plate. I wor­ry they are not listening.

As we know from human his­to­ry and now from the ety­mol­o­gy of “over,” a dev­il lives in the details of dom­i­nance. The fact that the word “over” encom­pass­es both above and below is a sig­nal that our lives are much more nuanced than they are bla­tant. Nevertheless, rulers (peo­ple with abun­dant wealth) have sub­tly ignored it and sent armies (peo­ple who work for them) into bat­tle for 5,000 years. 

Today, those same peo­ple bend words and real­i­ty with unprece­dent­ed pow­er, if not verac­i­ty, to take vio­lent excursions.

We are perched upon the knife-edge of an old sto­ry. Nation-states head­ed by ego­tists with vast resources fight for dom­i­nance over one anoth­er. Money, pow­er, and expan­sion­ist fever dreams pre­vail. That strug­gle is cel­e­brat­ed in ochre and car­bon pig­ment on the walls of Egyptian tombs and on our flat screens as images from drone cam­eras. We seem not to have evolved very much.

As iron­ic to me as the dou­ble-mean­ing of “over” is the fact that we wouldn’t have the lan­guage that sparked human inno­va­tion were it not for the enslaved peo­ple who labored in the cop­per mines of the Sinai Peninsula. They trans­formed the pharaoh’s 700 sym­bols, under­stood by one per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, into 20 sounds rep­re­sent­ed by an alpha­bet that the mass­es could deci­pher. The tech­nolo­gies we use today to save and kill each oth­er would not have been pos­si­ble if we still com­mu­ni­cat­ed with hieroglyphics.

I think we can ben­e­fit from an equal­ly ancient, less war­like idea by the Chinese philoso­pher, Lao Tzu. “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your char­ac­ter; watch your char­ac­ter, it becomes your destiny.”

Let’s think about mov­ing the word “over” to the end of our verbs. Wouldn’t life be much more sat­is­fy­ing (and safe) if we obsessed about do-overs and sleep­overs? Perhaps we could affect a change-over in the approach of those we elect to lead. Thanks to the alpha­bet, we only need to add the let­ter “L” to “over” to imag­ine a whole dif­fer­ent destiny.