I have two images in my mind today regarding Charlie Kirk: The video of his shooting, which I never asked for but some algorithm threw in front of me before I could even react, and the photo of him with his family.
I saw that video, and thought, "He's not going to live through that." Which, well.
And then that photo with two small kids at a birthday party, the children's faces carefully turned away from the camera, the photo carefully chosen to reframe the inevitable discussion. Those kids didn't ask for their father to be a repressive hate coward, and maybe he was someone different for them. He's gone now, though, and that will be a rupture they'll feel for the rest of their lives.
There was also the shooting in Evergreen, which isn't far from where I went to high school, and I had friends who went to school there. I've repeated so many times the story of being locked down in a temporary classroom in a high school near Columbine on the day that shooting occurred, and getting to have another two and a half decades to wonder why that one wasn't the last.
I try to walk the highwire of explaining what's going on to my eight-year-old, without freaking him out but without leaving him in questioning silence. He hears about this stuff, because it's swirling around. I don't yet dare to talk about how his beloved school, safe and full of friends, could become anything else. I somehow hold on to the hope that another world is possible, though that requires bravery and an innate sense of justice to inspire the build. It's hard for me to muster any sympathy for the bad people meeting bad ends, but I loathe the aftermath of escalating violence and risk of martyrdom that follows in their wake.
A terrible person, who talked about other people's children as worthy blood sacrifices to this country's gun fetish, met his end while fomenting division. Our collective life expectancy is dropping because of how many small children are dying, riddled with bullets, before age five. My own children, so beautiful and kind, deserve better than this looming threat and rising radicalism, which Kirk made a buck off of at every turn.
Hard to know how to finish this one, really, but Kirk is finished, and so his legacy is set. His record will be a lot of awful words, hateful opinions framed as bullying debates, and there is now no opportunity for him to pivot, for him to learn or have an ounce of shame for his behavior. That possibility is foreclosed, with the finality brutally brought to households across this country every day in the form of gunfire.
I don't think this is our natural state, and yet there are those in this nation that would seek to forcefully oppress us back into a war of all against all. One perished today, having pursued this singular aim: "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
No comments:
Post a Comment