The Fear of a Full Name

I can still hear my mom saying it. I would be upstairs or in the basement doing my own thing, when, out of nowhere, I would hear “Kathryn Blair Dunaway, you better come here right now”. Although rarely used, when she did use my full name, I knew that it was over with; more specifically, I was over with.

Since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, terrorism has been a constant threat, igniting fear in all American citizens, especially those who live in rural areas or the elders who live alone. The government has used the threat to “gain benefits from ideological support, power, and money” (Victor, 12). Political leaders have certain tactics to increase fear, and in return, increase their power. Mainly, “political leaders commonly use certain rhetorical claims to increase their influence and power to deal with the situation”(Victor, 10). They form claims to make terrorists sound like absolute evil; for instance, the Bush administration spoke about a terrorist’s main motivation is his hatred of freedom. Another rhetorical device is to exaggerate the numbers in the claim. In “Where are All the Suicide Bombers?”, Charles Kurzman reveals how the amount of actual terrorists on American Soil is so small that “out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11… Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths by the end of 2010” (Kurzman, 52). The last of these common rhetorical devices is the use of good sources that hold expert knowledge, like the CIA or NSA. In the end, the measures taken to protect and reassure citizens actually endangers and diminishes their civil liberties due to the increase in power caused by the fear of this moral panic.

The same fear instilled into citizens by the threat of terrorism was, in a way, instilled into me when my mother called my full name. My mother’s tone held a certain amount of harshness that immediately crippled me with fear. The use of my full name and tone established her power over me in a way that resembles how the government uses rhetorical devices to alter claims. Although there wasn’t a certain threat in the use of my full name, out of my mother’s power over me, the reason she used my full name and the way she said it created a fear in me. The fear prevented me from ever questioning what she said to me in the conversations that followed, which we see the same effect by American citizens when we look at new legislation following 9/11, mainly the Patriot Act.