Je suis Charlie
To be honest, I didn’t know much about him. I knew who he was, of course, and the cultural role he occupied, but I don’t think I’d paid much attention to him until last night, when I saw the news. I can’t say that I knew him well. I can only say that “Je suis Charlie” in the sense that he was my fellow citizen, and, like me, in the business of selling his ideas about politics. But that’s enough.
I didn’t know the twelve journalists who were murdered at Charlie Hebdo, either. But j’étais Charlie then, and je suis Charlie now. I am for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I am against murder.
I’m sad, shocked, and demoralized. This is the last thing my poor country needed.
Everyone, by now, has seen the footage. If I’d known what I was about to see, I never would have watched it. But I didn’t know. Utter horror. A vital young man in his prime, the crack of a bullet—the way his body slumped. I knew he hadn’t survived the moment I saw it.
We’re all accustomed, now, to seeing people die on our screens. We shouldn’t be. We’re not meant to see the violent extinction of a human life.
I don’t think the videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder should be published or circulated. It’s bad enough that he was murdered. That his death should be made into a spectacle is even worse. The same goes for Iryna Zarutska, the beautiful Ukrainian refugee who was murdered in Charlotte. I hope everyone who’s posting those videos thinks about what it would be like for their families to keep seeing them, over and over, wherever they look.
I’ll say what everyone else is saying. My heart goes out to his young wife and two very young children—just toddlers. My heart goes out to his parents.
America is sinking further and further into madness. It is unbearably sad.
I didn't really know him either. I realized this morning that he was in a video I viewed awhile ago of a debate at Oxford (?) between himself and one of the students about Israel/Palestine. I didn't agree with the murder of the United exec and I don't agree with this either. I find both the extreme right and progressive Left to be delighting in anything that happens against the other, no matter how grotesque the situation is/was. Madness.
But on a tangentially related point - isn't anyone even mildly curious to see how much Kirk is being lionized in the media. Whether you agree with him or not, he was not a career politician, he had held no political office, so why is Trump asking for flags at half-mast when he wouldn't do that for the democrat politician killed in WI? don't begrudge those who wish to honor him at all. It just seems like the internet has elevated people (on both sides) to God-like status which would never have happened in the before-times (I find myself using that phrase more and more lately and I am smack in the middle of Gen X but cannot be THAT old) and the resulting furor means we are falling farther into the black and white rabbit hole.
As is so often the case these days, most really public figures can be portrayed so differently as to make one assume some kind of split personality. Is Trump America’s savior or America’s destroyer? Can he possible be both? One wouldn’t be inclined to think so, but....
Charlie Kirk is being lionized by the right, but in deference to his assassination, reasonable people on the left and in the center are focused on the horror of the event, not on the character of the man. Unreasonable people on both sides are doing their normally despicable things as usual.
What gets left out in cases like this one is that one death by gun violence is, in the end, the same as every other gun death - something we should not be tolerating. In that sense, Charlie Kirk’s death is no different from the death of any one of the little kids who died at Sandy Hook Elementary with the exception that most of them had the unimaginable and incomprehensible experience of both seeing their classmates slaughtered and of seeing their own deaths coming.
History of course is never without its ironies. Kirk in 2023 noted, as did Bill O’Reilly years earlier that some gun deaths must be accepted if we are to maintain the Second Amendment. I don’t imagine he meant his own, but to the extent that he believed that, and given his proclivity for political divisiveness, he must have foreseen that possibility. In saying that, I’ve been lately accused by many of ‘celebrating’ his death. That is certainly not the case. It’s just that as one who has just passed his 80th year, I have a distinct appreciation for historical irony.
But in the end, this is not about who Charlie Kirk was or was not, but that someone with access to a long gun felt he had the right to kill another human being from hiding 200 yards away. Was he mentaily ill, as will be the default position of gun rights activists, or a ‘radical leftie’ which already is the default position of many on the right. Or was there some other reason unrelated to either mental incapacity or political leaning. If law enforcement catches the assassin alive, we may well find out. if not, we will have to imply his motives from whatever evidence law enforcement may find among whatever he has left behind. It does not matter to Charlie Kirk. And apart from whatever effect the motive may have on his wife and children, it will likely not matter a great deal to them in comparison to the simple enormity of their loss of a husband and father.
The newest elephant in this room, thought, is that we have, for the first time in our history elected to the Presidency of the United States a man who has frequently and openly espoused both physical and political violence as long as it is committed on his behalf. I don’t know what effect if any that may have had on the Utah shooter, but one cannot discount the possibility. But in electing such a man, we have taken one more step down a road the Founders knew all too well was possible, but hoped to god we never would, and hoped that the guardrails they’d put into the Constitution would make it at least unlikely. The next step is up to “We the People”, as all the rest of the steps we’ve taken so far in our history have been. What’s it gonna be?