“Why Don’t We Just

Tell Them Our Names?”

 

A devotional by Siegfried S. Johnson on Wednesday, September 12, 2007

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

Not many four year olds are quoted by the President and, subsequently, by a national news magazine, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 both President Bush and then Newsweek featured four year old Laura Beth Kulbacki’s suggestion on how to deal with terrorists who hate a country full of people they don’t even know.  “Why don’t we just tell them our names?” suggested Laura Beth.

 

When I saw that line I thought of the 1991 film, “Silence of the Lambs.”  The FBI is profiling and tracking a dangerous serial killer who has abducted 21 year old Catherine Martin.  Her frantic and distressed mother, Senator Ruth Martin, broadcasts a televised plea for mercy in hopes of convincing the killer to release Catherine.  During the plea, she speaks her daughter’s name, Catherine, over and over and over, while showing pictures of Catherine’s childhood.  An FBI observer explains the rationale.  “If the abductor begins to see Catherine as a person and not just an object, it’s harder to tear her up.”  Give the child a name.  Make the potential killer think of her as an individual with a name.

 

Yesterday was sixth anniversary of 9/11, a day our nation’s comprehension was strained to make room for the incomprehensible, a day so full of horror that we need no anniversary to remind us that we live a very un-safe world requiring vigilance, that there are those whose passion is to destroy the United States and the Western way of life.  We live with that reality everyday, amazed and thankful that for these six years a second attack has not been accomplished by those who hate us.

 

Ever wondered what a terrorist waiting to board a plane is thinking?  Sitting in the gate area, knowing he intends to kill all these innocents around him, what is he thinking?  One thing I can imagine the terrorist is most surely not thinking, is about the individual names of his victims.  I’m quite sure he would not want to know their names.  He needs to think of that plane full of people in group terms which he has been taught to use to define his enemies — the West, the Great Satan, the decadence produced by American values of individual freedom.  Only by thinking of these innocents as a block is he able to maintain sanity while following through on his insane purpose.  The individual names, I can imagine, would drive him crazy.  Imagine a playful four year old becoming talkative in the waiting area.  The last think the terrorist would say is, “Little girl, what’s your name?”  No, he wouldn’t want to know.  To know names would be at cross-purposes with his intent – not to destroy individuals so much as to destroy an idea.

 

It seems part and parcel of the terrorist enterprise to deal in group names by which the terrorist has been taught to regard the enemy.  Take, as an example, the stump speech of Osama bin Laden broadcast after 9/11 by Al Jazeera.  The speech can be boiled down to this:  “We have long been victimized by outsiders who don’t understand or appreciate our culture, who have undermined our values, corrupted our young, exploited our natural resources, disregarded our time-tested social arrangements, dominated our economy, and ruined our women . . .  We have been occupied by a materialistic, decadent invader who has no respect for our ways . . . now is the time for all to come to the aid of this Holy Jihad.”

 

Sound familiar?  Change a word here and there and you have the language of another fanatical group’s glory days in our own South, the Ku Klux Klan.  Terror was the purpose.  Like Osama, there was no program but Pure-Dee meanness and a yen to rev up the crowd just to hear ‘em roar. Thus, in 1963, the South gave birth to a 120 proof, demented Southern segregationalist who would bomb a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, the 16^th Street Baptist Church, on a Sunday morning, killing four innocent girls: 3 eleven year olds and one 14 year old.   I imagine the same was true, that the bomber wouldn’t have wanted to know the names of the innocents whose lives his bomb snuffed out on that Sunday morning forty-four years ago?  No, surely his classification of his victims was in the vulgar language of racism, lumping them all together with pejoratives and profanity.

 

Another KKK enemy was the Jews, in the same spirit as bin Laden, “Once we lived in a golden age that has been destroyed by a Jewish conspiracy, by the presence of undesirables who took away our glory.”  Bearded Osama and the hooded Kluxer in front of a burning cross would understand each other perfectly.  Something of the past is faded and gone, and if our action can’t restore it, at least we can let the world know we’re mad as hell.

 

When a great and noble people have been defeated some, claiming a desire to recapture the past, are prone to radicalism.  Blame and envy become roots of violence and evil.  And fear -- fear in knowing that the new world order is destroying the way of life they have known, even if that way of life is filled with inequity, injustice, and hurt.  For one willing to terrorize in order to make a point, they must think in terms only of the group name, an idea, a block of enemies to be resisted in a Holy Crusade.  To think of their victims as individuals, persons with names, would surely drive them mad.

 

What gives rise to such horror?  In both the cases of Al Qaeda and the KKK, a complex culture’s greatness was obscured by defeat.  If there was once a progressive culture within the Arab world, it waits to be revived, but it will not be by assassins and terrorists.  There was once a great Arab tradition of hospitality and individual honor, somehow lost, which now has given way to explosive rage and hatred.

 

By the same score, there was once a great Southern tradition of chivalry, gallantry, and honor.   Osama bin Laden’s terrorism no more restores the former glory of Islam than the Birmingham church bomber defended the honorable legacy of Robert E. Lee.  In both cases, a code that once gave birth to a great civilization stressing hospitality to the stranger and personal honor, has been turned inside out by killers who claim to be its defenders.  But rather than defending an ancient creed, they have perverted it, chivalry, honor, and gallantry being twisted into its opposite. 

 

Yes, I suggest it is a common denominator of terrorism, “We don’t want to know their names.”  This year is the 50^th Anniversary of another event in our own state, the Little Rock Central Crisis of 1957.  I suspect the same is true of those most virulent in their protests 50 years ago -- no need to learn the names of these Little Rock Nine.   Viewed as a block, it was easy for “Them” to be resisted with anger and fear of change, fear of losing the way things are, the way of life they had known.  

 

One understands this impasse toward peace when one thinks of the recently famous Hamas propaganda for children used in the Gaza, Farfour, a Mickey Mouse look-a-like intended to teach the youngest of Palestinian children in the Gaza to hate the Jews.  When Hamas was challenged for copyright infringement, they simply had Farfour beaten to death by an actor meant to be a Jewish person seeking Farfour’s ancestral land.  Beaten to death – on television – for the children to learn.  Farfour taught the kids in a high-pitched, Mickey Mouse voice, “You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islam . . . we will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem,” as he is simulating shooting an AK-47 and throwing grenades. 

 

Hey, you gotta start with the kids, as Rodgers and Hammerstein point out in South Pacific:

 

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year.

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.

 You’ve got to be carefully taught.

 

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid,

of people whose eyelids are oddly made. 

And people whose skin is a different shade. 

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

 

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six, or seven, or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

 

How can Islamic terrorists hate an entire nation of people they don’t know, an entire culture?  Even little Laura Beth wondered that, concluding, “Why don’t we just tell them our names?”  Simple enough.  The world’s ills, however, don’t invite such simple solutions. 

 

Sources and special notes:

“Perspectives,” in Newsweek, November 19, 2001.  It is from the Perspectives page, which headlines the words of a four year old girl, that I received the original impulse to deal with this subject.

 

“Sound Familiar?” an op-ed piece by Paul Greenberg in The Arkansas Democrat/Gazette, October 14, 2001.  I owe a great debt to Mr. Greenberg’s piece in the preparation of this devotional, particularly in the area of drawing a comparison between bin Laden and the KKK. 

 

“It’s Terror Mouse!” an editorial in The Arkansas Democrat/Gazette, July 6, 2007.