“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This memorable line from Shakespeare’s Juliet suggests the reality of something doesn’t depend on what name it happens to be called. It has been widely applied to matters from the romantic to the political.
We have recently spent a week reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11 with broad and appropriate acknowledgment of the horror of that cruel injustice that wreaked so much damage and loss of life, both immediately and over the longer term. Images of airplanes striking the actual and symbolic icons of economic success and dominance will be forever engraved in our memories and history.
An attack on innocent people by extremists in the service of an ideology hostile to what those symbols mean to them is an attack with grave consequences. It is an attack that resulted in 3,000 deaths and years of ongoing illness.
With those images of the crashing airplanes in mind, I remembered another, more recent image. It was received quite differently.
It is the image of Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw before a cheering crowd in February 2025. He was celebrating his and his DOGE colleagues’ work during the first month of the new administration, slashing “waste” from federal expenditures.
Weeks earlier, Musk posted on social media that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” cutting funding to an organization that, for over 60 years, had provided global humanitarian aid and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Estimates of the consequences of the loss of USAID indicate that between 700,000 and 750,000 lives have been lost. These have mostly been children suffering from malnutrition and preventable and treatable diseases—all a result of Musk’s chainsaw work.
It is not hard to think of this as an attack on innocent people by agents of an ideology hostile to the work of a longstanding effort to provide resources from a nation of abundance to a world of critical need in so many areas of life.
The attack of 9/11 was horrendous and worthy of the kind of remembrance it will continue to receive. The attack by agents of the Trump administration last February on one of the actual and symbolic expressions of who we are as a nation in a world neighborhood was celebrated with cheers at the Conservative Political Action Conference. These actions would claim hundreds of thousands of lives in the following months and years.
The image of Elon Musk with a chainsaw is on the same shelf in my mind as the image of planes crashing into the Twin Towers. An attack by any other name can be just as devastating.
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Professor emeritus of religious studies at Mercer University, a member of Smoke Rise Baptist Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and the author of Keys for Everyday Theologians (Nurturing Faith Books, 2022).