It feels like something’s happened in our country.
That’s where I’ve been since learning Charlie Kirk, a political figure I’d spent little time thinking about, was shot Wednesday during an open-air event at Utah Valley University, later (or perhaps immediately) dying.
He was 31.
He had two very young children and a wife.
In his world — red-hot, extreme-right-wing, social-media-and-beyond conservatism — he was a star.
He made his fortune as an influential peddler of ideas and policies and points and harangues that were frequently not true, that he frequently knew were not true, and entirely divisive.
His figurative north star was defending Donald Trump in all circumstances independent of all the ways Trump might abuse that loyalty, all of which made him fairly irredeemable, not that he didn’t have millions on his side, not that he deserved to die, not that his children deserve to grow up without their father, not that his wife deserved to lose her husband.
Because political violence is not all right.
It’s not all right because lives can be needlessly taken.
It’s not all right because killing, nearly all instances, is not all right.
It’s not all right, more than anything, because it promotes political violence.
That’s what strikes the most fear
That’s where I am.
You?
Hearing of Kirk’s death, my first thought was the year of my birth, 1968.
A primer:
Vietnam raged.
A sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who’d done so much good for so many people in this country, announced he would not run for reelection; Vietnam, for which he was also responsible, stealing the chance.
On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
On June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
On April 23, in between assassinations, student protesters seized control of Columbia University, shutting it down the remainder of the spring semester.
On October 16, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who’d claimed Olympic gold and bronze in the 200 meters in Mexico City, lifted their gloved black fists in the air during the Star Spangled Banner’s playing and were stripped of their medals and sent home the next day.
The Civil Rights Movement was ongoing.
The Women’s Movement was ongoing.
The Sexual Revolution was ongoing.
People were in the streets demanding liberty and justice for all.
Ugly rebukes of all such movements were ongoing, too.
The soul of the nation hung in the balance.
America was ripping apart at the seams.
I wonder if we’re there again.
I wonder if Kirk’s murderer, still not caught, may strike again.
I’m scared of revenge assassinations of liberal activists and commentators.
Or, perhaps, of never-Trump conservatives, whose North Star is democracy, norms and institutions, rather than keeping friends, making money and putting reelection and party over country.
I think about that.
Then I think about this.
Also Wednesday, though nobody was killed, two students were shot and injured at Evergreen (Colo.) High School, west of Denver.
Two weeks ago, in Minneapolis, three were killed and 21 injured when shots were fired through windows during a school-wide mass at Annunciation Catholic School and nobody knows their names even now, nor do I remember Oklahoma politicians falling all over each other to mourn them the way they were mourning Kirk Wednesday afternoon and since.
Come to think of it, nor did they have much to say on Tuesday when it was proven our president really did author a page of a birthday book to Jeffrey Epstein in which Donald Trump’s own signature doubled for an apparent young woman’s pubic hair; a page in a book in which every other page, like Trump’s, also implied knowledge Epstein had a thing for having sex with very young women.
Like this page:
So, I worry about the future of our country, like will we still have one as we’ve long known it. I worry about intractable issues growing too big to solve, about a political state of play too far gone to retrieve, about violence and assassination becoming a new normal we must go through just as our parents, grandparents and great grandparents went through 1968 and the years that followed.
I then wonder why it has taken Charlie Kirk’s murder to make so many stand up and say “this can’t happen” or “this can’t be allowed to happen” or “this is the beginning of terrible things for our country” given only what’s happened the last couple of weeks, the last month, the last six months, the last 10 years.
Troops in the streets.
Inflation making a comeback.
A lawless president.
An entire political party believing mass gun tragedies to be a reasonable price paid to allow the citizenry unfettered access to any firearm, automatic weapons included, never mind universal background checks, reasonable waiting periods or legal means restricting them from the mentally unmoored or domestic abusers.
Is the nation not coming apart already?
This time, the victim was famous.
So, maybe, stock will be taken and temperatures may settle … for a bit.
Perhaps there’s that.
Otherwise?
Just another day in the country we tell ourselves is great.
Preface 1968 with the assassinations of Malcolm and JFK, and add in the shooting of Heorge Wallace that permanently paralyzed him, and that was my young adulthood. I DO NOT want my granddaughters to live through this political hate.