Metaphors

It's always darkest before the dawn is a great cliche because it reminds us that things always look at their worst before they get better. But isn't that kind of obvious? When things start getting better, than they clearly have gotten to be as bad as they are going to get NOW, this time. They will start getting bad again later, but right now this is the worst it's gotten.

And the night doesn't actually get darker. Once it's night, it's dark. Unless you're in a city that knows how to burn bulbs, in which case the evening begins to look like a nite brite toy from the 70s.

I prefer to think of the day being an injury to the night. Our language backs me up. Day breaks. Yes, night falls, but it heals and cools the earth after the day has heated it up. The horizon looks like an injury at both ends of the day. The sun rises and burns red over our earth Eastward. When the sun sets over the West, the horizon burns red again, as a dark cover of night tries to cover it, and cool the earth from the damage we have done.

We act in daylight, where we can see what we're doing and we are culpable, people can tell what we're doing. What we do in the daylight is meant to be seen, we save criminal activity for night.
That is not true, of course, but right now I'm just following metaphors around trying to figure out why we think the way we do.
I was reading a book and grown women were referred to as "girls;" the novel was written in the 60s and that WAS how a grown man might have thought about two women who were older than he was. The women were childlike. He was a man. That doesn't happen much anymore. Yes, of course some men refer to women as girls, but not all men, and certainly not like they did in 1962.

Hope springs eternal; I'm not going to list all the ways that it feels like the Ego "taking our country back" is turning into this country going backwards. We all live here, and we all live here now. But I do want us to think about how he's mangling the language so we can use it properly against him. Language shapes the way we speak, of course, but also changes the way we think, because we get comfortable with certain means of expression. It's important to notice when those means of expression change and why.