When I heard the news of the killings at the Tree of Life Synagogue, a week ago Saturday, I instantly thought of the poem by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller. The one whose opening lines are, “First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.” The poem goes on to list many groups for whom the unnamed narrator did not speak out, concluding with the devastating words, “and then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Niemoller wrote the piece in 1946 to criticize German intellectuals who remained silent while the Nazis carried out their campaign of genocide against Jewish citizens. Martin Niemoller’s poem is etched into the Boston Holocaust Memorial. There are actually several versions of the poem because Niemoller would often change the groups to make his point — that those who hate will always find targets for their venom and that those who are afraid to speak will never be protected by keeping silent.
I’ve been wondering if and when enough would be enough to move those who have been afraid. I’ve been looking for signs during the last two years as the vitriol both political and cultural — has ramped up to dangerous levels. And listening while many insist that the poisonous rhetoric is in no way linked to tragedies in a Pittsburgh synagogue, a Charleston church, a Sikh temple, and a Kansas bar. That it is not connected to the too many to count singular physical and verbal attacks on people of color and other perceived outsiders during which the assailants shouted: “This is Trump country now!” No, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I am not saying the President committed the crimes at the Tree of Life synagogue, but I am saying he has animated hate groups to a fever pitch. To paraphrase a recent comment from Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, “I’m not calling the President a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he is a racist.” The environment President Trump has encouraged had to have helped feed the misplaced anger of 46-year-old Robert Bowers. Bowers, who had been seething about a Jewish organization that helped assist Jews and other immigrants in transitioning to this country. Immigrants like the ones the President has been railing about in pre-midterm election rallies. Stoking the fears of people like Bowers to take action against what President Trump calls the “invasion” of immigrants. In this case, the caravan of Honduran mostly women and children seeking asylum.
And it could have been worse if in the days before the synagogue massacre another would be attacker’s plans had been realized. Cesar Sayoc’s 14 mail bombs targeted at the president’s political critics thankfully did not explode. No doubt the people who decide to commit murder and violent attacks are not psychologically stable. But, the longer we passively accept the environment which supports them, the more we, too, are sickened.
Words matter. 21 years after pastor Martin Niemoller wrote his poem about silence in the face of evil, another American pastor asked Americans to take a public moral stand. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” In the name of the innocent 11 who just lost their lives, and the many others before them, we, all of us, must raise our voices.
