Charlie Kirk was harmful. His killing was worse. Meeting harm with harm only deepens our moral debt.
I know Substack is already flooded with takes on the assassination of political commentator Charlie Kirk. If you are at all engaged in American politics and culture war, you already have an opinion about the man.
This isn’t my plea for us to all just get along.
We are far too moved down the road of antagonism with the “other side” to just hang it all up and be friends. That’s not the world we live in.
I’m not going to soften who Kirk was now that he’s been violently killed. He contributed to our collective seething for “others” as much as any one person has over the past decade.
What I will ask for is a change in the response. I know how ineffective that is, just some guy with a blog asking a nation to shake itself from its collective post tragedy thrashing.
America needs a reckoning.
We don’t go through all of this because of some collective failing as a nation. No, we’ve allowed systems that profit from fear, pain, misery, and hate to metastasize.
In an Information Age and a deeply networked society, engagement is the resource everyone is looking to exploit.
Emotions drive engagement.
Anger is the easiest emotion to elicit.
Anger drives profit.
I don’t know how we turn all of that around. The system we have is unsustainable. It will either be reformed peacefully, or it will implode spectacularly, taking many of us with it. Every day the latter grows more likely.
I write what I write here to inspire people to look at themselves, to really look, seek to understand themselves and how they affect the world around them. We want the world to change overnight for the better. It doesn’t work that way.
Like a bad team looking to improve, it starts with the individual members seeing their flaws clearly, and working to improve upon them. We can’t change the systems we’ve built until we change ourselves.
Charlie Kirk was a harmful person. He actively harmed the lives of transgendered people, of minorities with his rhetoric. He advocated for keeping things the same as they are, or even for things to regress, where a clear hierarchy existed in society, and people were “put in their place”.
But meeting all of that with an act of evil only adds evil to the world. If you are pushing back on his message, this is sure to radicalize more to take it further. If you agree with him you may use this to justify your own violence.
Charlie Kirk was not a good person. But he was a person, capable of growth and change. Even if he never would change, the possibility remained.
Maybe through his children, or through meeting a person that challenges the narratives he believed in. He could be better tomorrow.
Now he can’t, he will be forever enshrined as a martyr for an angry political movement. Nothing good was accomplished today.
I’m angry. I’m angry that we have come to this as a nation. I’m angry at the people celebrating because the other side lost. I’m angry at the coming retribution that is on its way.
I’m angry, and I’m desperate. Desperate to get a nation, a world, to look inward at themselves, to empathize with those different from them. I am desperate for all people to simply see all others as people too.
But I can’t change the world. And I can’t change the nation. I can only change myself. And in the wake of this tragedy, because it is a tragedy, even if you hated everything the man stood for, I will keep pushing to meet evil with good. To meet harm with help.
Charlie Kirk was an asshole. But he was still a person. And he didn’t deserve this. His family didn’t deserve this. The people who worked with him, who thought they were doing genuine good, didn’t deserve this.
In the doom, focus on what you can do, not what you can’t.
Violence is evil. Full stop.
We owe dignity to everyone, even the ones we oppose, even the ones who hate us. Especially them.
Your ledger records every choice. Will it say you added good, or harm?
Choose wisely.
Be better tomorrow.
Beautifully put! If we are against hate and violence, and for empathy and kindness, then that cannot be circumstantial. We cannot celebrate the death of a man who was arguably a bad person. We cannot meet our morals halfway. Either we live by them, or we don’t.