What I have to say today is going to be a little U.S.-centric. To my friends elsewhere who are reading this, I hope you'll bear with me, because we're going through some Bantha poodoo right now.
Two days ago, as I write this, a conservative influencer called Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a political event in Utah. Law enforcement has captured and named a suspect, but we don't yet know the killer's motive. A few weeks ago, Melissa Horton, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was murdered, and another legislator was wounded by the same shooter, and we don't yet know that killer's motive either.
This is not how we do things in the U.S., my brain says. And yet, this is the way we've been doing things for a while now.
I want to take a second here to address the “politics” of what I'm about to say. This dialogue touches on “politics,” because the victims I've mentioned were political figures, and while we don't have clear motives for their murders, they were almost certainly victims of political violence. But it shouldn't be a controversial stance to condemn political violence, no matter who the victims might be.
But there's another part to this story that I haven't brought up yet. Because minutes after the news broke that Kirk had been shot, we learned of yet another school shooting at a Colorado high school. I'm not at all interested in that shooter's motive. But it's telling that this tragedy barely made an impact on the public consciousness.
It's just another school shooting, after all.
We don't view an event like that as political violence, but to take a stance on whether this is an acceptable price for our society to be forced to pay is viewed as one of the most hotly-debated political questions. And in the 21st-century U.S., politics comes with a body count.
Again, it shouldn't be a controversial stance to condemn school shootings. But somehow it is.
I'm not old enough to remember the 1960s, but I've sure studied it. It was a decade of great social change and great social backlash, and as I look around at what is left of the nation in which I grew up, there's almost nothing that survived from those days.
Except the murder.
In April 1968, a racist gunned down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, at a critical point in the civil rights movement. While the black community mourned, and no small part of white society celebrated, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, whose own brother had fallen to an assassin's bullet less than five years earlier, issued a heartfelt plea for peace:
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
You can read the entire address here. It's worth taking the time.
Of course, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot as well. Political violence, even then, was nothing new, but at least we had public figures and political leaders trying to cool the temperature of the country, to tamp down the violent rhetoric.
We don't have that today, or at least not enough. Instead, we have a politics based on division, promoted by political figures who aspire to be influencers rather than legislators, where the hot take is valued much more highly than the cold hard facts, and triggering one's political opponents is both the means and the ends.
As I said, we still don't know the motive for Kirk's murder, but within minutes of the news of his death, a South Carolina congresswoman – I'm not going to name her, because that would be giving her the attention she desperately craves – claimed that “Democrats own what happened today” and refused to address similar violence directed at her political opponents. Another GOP member of Congress called for designating his political opponents as domestic terrorists. Within minutes of the news breaking, right-wing commentator Alex Jones claimed Kirk was the victim of “out of control leftist violence,” and even the President released a video blaming the “radical left” for Kirk's death, more than 24 hours before police even named a suspect.
The narrative was set, far in advance of the facts. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Algorithms now form the business model on which we live, and those algorithms are based almost solely on outrage. Dialogue has been replaced by diatribe, then by demagoguery. Underdog politics and social media have, wittingly or un-, conspired to make us not just disagree, but hate, those who want different policy prescriptions.
And this is what has to stop. We can have disagreements over policy, but we can't let bad actors stoke those disagreements into a fury in which we cease to recognize the essential humanity of our political opponents.
This should not be a controversial statement.
In the wake of Kirk's death, many people have quoted him as saying that some number of gun deaths are a necessary, “rational” price to pay for our right to bear arms under the Constitution. I don't agree, and I suspect that had he known how his own life would end, he might not have agreed either.
