Empowered

1.To give power or authority to; Authorize: Is that what everyone wants, to be empowered? Is that what the gurus and psychologists are suggesting to us? When you look at the definition from Dictionary.com, it kind of puts a different spin on the word. Instead of a boost of confidence, or some invisible motivational tool, empowerment is actually permission to be the boss. So who grants this power? Is it a supernatural force, or another empowered person?
   It seems like something that everyone should have access to; especially if it means more money, more power, or rising a step closer to telling others what to do. In it's literal sense, weighed against society, it makes all of us beneath the empowered. I suggest that the empowered adhere to the second definition of the word.
2. To enable or permit: Wait, I can't use the word "enable" around here because it means that someone is helping a person indulge their destruction, and it's better to let them crash and burn without your help as it is inevitable. The empowered should be providing at least a sturdy platform for us, paired with the very real possibility of empowerment. Of course the level of empowerment is relative to your trade, and should be filed next to corporate girth. Then the responsibility belongs to you; you are "permitted" to build up, sit down, or jump off the platform.
  The point is that we have so many words at our disposal that many of them become no more than useless slang. It is possible to convey a point using slang, but it cheapens the true definition and context of a language. It can be compared to someone who fills in the blanks of their vocabulary with profanity. It has it's place, but is generally percieved as ignorant. The same goes for our politics. There are so many words that have been reduced to cliche' or "watch words" that the true meaning has been lost. I have been called names that help a person better define what team I may be on by using words that are completely meaningless, or have been stripped down to the point of nausea. No one belongs exclusively to any team if we're honest with ourselves. If you do buy into one philosophy, and simplify it beyond definition, then you must be hiding from something that you are hard-wired to believe. We are all the same.
   Whether you adhere to the conservative package, or the more obscure liberal package doesn't matter. You are either willing to give or not. I suggest that everyone stick to what we have to say without changing definitions to meet our personal ideals; if not then there will never be anything to believe. We can spend our entire lives' dodging around in the cliche' and the meaningless to no avail, but the end result will always be emptiness. Choose your words carefully, measure them, and define them so that if nothing else you will be saying something instead of the alternative, culture sapping slang that the empowered media has defined so effectively for us.