Today the remembrances for 9/11 feel overshadowed by the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah. Yesterday also brought news of a school shooting in Colorado. The shooter took his own life, and though several people were injured, thankfully the victims are expected to recover.
As for Kirk’s assassination, I’ve seen a lot of vitriol on Facebook from different political groups. I can only imagine what is happening on X. Much of what I’ve read has been full of anger and blame, especially toward liberals. I’ve even seen people writing that “karma’s a bitch” by non-supporters when it comes to Kirk being killed by a gun. The bottom line is that the death of Charlie Kirk by a lone gunman seems to be stirring up more anger than unity against violence.
Sigh. I never agreed with almost all of Charlie Kirk’s beliefs, though his followers certainly did. Still, it wasn’t okay to kill him. I have empathy for his followers as they grieve. I feel for them because I am still raw from the politically motivated murder in June of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog. The same suspect, Vance Boelter, also shot and injured State Senator John Hoffman and his wife in separate targeted attacks. He had a “hit list” of 45 state and federal Democrats.
I’ve been reading and listening to many different takes on the Kirk assassination in the last 18 hours—why it happened, who did it (motivation unknown as of this writing), what it means. But what I crave is not retribution, not escalation, but a way forward. How do we resolve the growing anger before it consumes us all?
I want to share an essay that speaks to that question.
By Anand Giridharadas
1. Couples therapists will tell you it’s not fighting that worries them. It’s contempt that often proves fatal to a relationship.
2. What America is living through is not just disagreement, division, polarization; it is, above all, swelling civic contempt.
3. Disagreement, division, polarization are in the territory of “I think this way; you think that.” Civic contempt is different. It brings in attitudes of dismissal, fatalism; it imagines the adversary to be nothing more and nothing less than the views they hold in contrast to yours; it denies to the other the complexity we know in ourselves; it is built on a sense that people can’t change.
4. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, or before that of Melissa and Mark Hortman, or before that of Brian Thompson, or the attempts on the lives of Donald Trump and Paul Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer — these acts are invariably committed by individuals with idiosyncratic stories and beliefs. But they are the magmic core of an entire culture losing its faith in the democratic method of changing things.
5. We must say, again and again, that this is not how you get the world you want. Never like this. It’s not right, and it doesn’t work. It achieves nothing. It simply pushes the country one step further down the road so that one day soon it will be someone you like instead of loathe meeting their own bullet in their own neck.
6. But we must show more than tell. When the society feels to so many like a giant conspiracy not to help them, not to see their pain and fix their problems, when that feeling festers day after hour, decade after year, something curdles in the blood. A sense of being cosmically uncared for spreads. A sense that no one is coming, that you are on your own. And very quickly on the heels of these feelings comes the feeling that, if you want it done, you better do it. Because no one hears and nothing works, there is a dangerous descent into cheering somebody, anybody, who does something.
7. The moment when the gun goes off is when we pay attention, but it always begins long before. And not in the extreme act itself but in the encircling culture that fosters it, that is causing these things to happen more and more. And it is a culture we all participate in. Few of us would ever contemplate barbarism like this. But most of us participate in the ways of looking, the ways of judging, the ways of writing off, the ways of civic contempt, that make barbarism more probable, that give it permission.
8. We dehumanize; we demonize; we essentialize; we confuse victims with perpetrators; we deny people the dignity of complexity. We imagine there can be no good reason to think differently. We cut people off instead of remembering that the person we have loved for decades is still in there somewhere, right behind their opinions. We confuse our own discomfort with danger, imagining that people who need help are a menace to us. We roll our eyes at each other’s fears, instead of taking those fears seriously, which is not the same as validating the claims inflaming it.
9. There are so many places and junctures to intervene to stop carnage like this: where guns are sold or not, where mental healthcare is given or not, where security is properly orchestrated or not, where leaders encourage violence or don’t. But you don’t need to know a thing about who did this one, or that one, or the other one, to know that no one is safe until we address the chronic illness in our body politic itself.
10. Democracy is, in the beginning and in the end, a belief that we can live together despite difference and choose the future together. It is a beautifully reckless idea, because it is hard enough for a family to decide what to have for dinner. But it works; in fact, it works better than all the other systems. It is built on the idea that the way to change the world around you is to try to change others’ minds. This would have surprised some of our ancestors, who found it easier to draw a sword. What is at stake now is whether we can defend the idea, and the lived belief, that you change things by changing people. We must tell this to people. More importantly, we must show it.
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