Artillery: (n) large-caliber guns used in warfare on land.

Lobbing huge shells through the air often countless miles, to land to Earth, to wreak havoc and create destruction.

The purpose for such a weapon is to grant the consolation that we can believe we are fighting a war without actually having to behold the devastation.

It’s really quite ingenious in a devious way.

After all, what could be more intense and ferocious than hand-to-hand combat, where we place our lives in jeopardy, hoping that we’re strong enough to overcome our opponent, or even sitting in a foxhole, shooting our rifles across the no-man’s land, hoping to hit some man?

I’m not going to write either a rebuke of war or a promotion of it in order to preserve freedom.

But I will tell you that the way we lob artillery shells of words, emotions and anger across our cultures in today’s battlefield of human communication is nasty.

It used to be that people had names. Then, for a while, they had titles. And now we identify each other by clan and culture.

So it’s Republicans against Democrats. No decent Republican will step out of the pack, be an individual and vote on a specific issue separate from the party plans.

Likewise, no Democrat will have a kind word for a Republican because in so doing, he or she might accidentally promote their pernicious cause.

In today’s world, we are black and we are white. We are Hispanic and Native American.

Trying to gain individuality in a season when individuality is supposedly extolled is virtually impossible because we need to summarize all of our problems in an eight-minute segment on CNN or Fox News.

So we lob shells at each other.

We refuse to stand as individuals–a person who is given a name, possessing one beautiful brain and be our own person, but instead, we want to conduct a wicked war of words from a distance, never completely comprehending the damage we do to one another.

There is no such thing as a black culture. There are people who have black skin.

There is no such thing as a white Native American, Hispanic, Asian, French, English, German or even NASCAR culture.

God gave us the personal space to make free-will choices, which if we sacrifice to be part of an artillery line of banging and clanging guns of words, is just another atrocity in an unrighteous war.

• I am not white, I am human.
• I am not of German descent, I am a person.

And if I’m going to do war with you, I’m going to have to face you eyeball-to-eyeball and express myself in a way that will communicate my conviction. I can’t sit in a roomful of white people and lob shells at the perceived enemy

It’s up to us:

The introduction of artillery gave us the ability to kill at a distance.

The introduction of “culture” has done the same.

Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix