The left-wing organization MoveOn subjected itself to ridicule this week by posting a message to its social media accounts: “Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end.” The attached graphic had to do with the minimum wage, which the staff at MoveOn in their infinite wisdom believe should be $15. A young man holds a placard bearing the words “I’m doing the job of 3 people: cashier, baker, and running the store. Thats lot [sic] of work just minimum wage. I deserve $15 and union rights.”
We’ll leave it to readers to decide what kind of store-owner lets his or her minimum-wage employee “run” the place. We’ll also leave aside that word “deserve” and suggest to the suffering employee that, with the unemployment rate just over 4 percent, it’s a job-seeker’s market out there and he may wish to look around.
It was the statement that “low wages are violence” that had people spewing coffee onto their laptops. If low wages are violence, then there is no such thing as violence, and words have no meaning.
In MoveOn’s defense, though, it has to be said that this use of the word violence didn’t come from nowhere. James Bowman, in his fine book Honor: A History, attributes the generic use of the word to the decline of what he calls cultural (as distinct from reflexive) honor. “Originally it referred only to criminal violence, as its relation to ‘violate’ reminds us. But its modern sense makes it difficult if not impossible for us any longer to express the distinction, so central to cultural honor, between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust fighting.”
We recall, for instance, Robert Kennedy’s 1968 speech on the “mindless menace of violence.” The nation was wracked by street violence, Kennedy said, but there was
RFK spoke these words just as news spread of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the speech is moving in its way. But it played a role in making the word violence synonymous with any lamentable social ill. If schools without books are a form of violence, so are low wages. But if that’s true, how do we describe actual violence—muggings, murder, rape? These, we assume, are now called statistics.
